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by brandonb·14y ago·view on hn ↗
My startup works on fraud detection, and it's amazing to see how sophisticated criminals get when there are such large sums of money involved. The black market for stolen credit card numbers is a real market with division of labor: some people hack in to processors to steal the numbers, others resell those credit card numbers, others write scripts to create fake accounts for a particular site, others integrate all of those tools to actually execute the fraud, etc.

Just in the past couple of months, we've seen online criminals try to:

* Run money laundering schemes by posting fake items for sale on a marketplace, and "purchasing" their own item using a stolen credit card.

* Create fake accounts from different browsers to get tons of free machine resources, which they then use for more nefarious purposes.

* Rent a bot net to run a distributed fraud ring from many different machines, in a way that's almost undetectable.

* fool SMS verification by setting up a Twilio server to make it look like they have a U.S. phone number.

You can imagine how fun it must be to outsmart them. :-)

By the way, if any of you are running online stores or marketplaces, and seeing a sudden spike of fraud or chargebacks from this breach, feel free to ping me (brandon@siftscience.com). We may be able to help.

2 comments
How did you detect that it was a money laundering scheme in the first place !?
I'd love to say but then it'd be obvious to any fraudsters out there. :-(
To summarize: Lots of people are Scum.
Sturgeon's Law.
94% is it?