40 People Arrested For Alleged Twitch Money Laundering Scheme (kotaku.com) 21
On Tuesday, Turkish police in eleven different provinces took forty suspects into custody for an alleged money laundering scam perpetrated using the Twitch streaming platform. Kotaku reports: According to Demiroren News Agency (via Daily Sabah and Dexerto), the suspects are accused of using stolen credit cards to buy Bits, which are essentially the platform's virtual currency. Those Bits were then allegedly sent to streamers, who then paid the scammers real money through a 70 to 80 percent refund. So, if the scammers bought 1,000 Bits for $10, this could be a way for them to make $7 or $8 from a stolen credit card, and streamers to pick up the difference. Compound more stolen credit cards and much higher dollar amounts, and you end up with a scam that could total an estimated $9.8 million. This appears to be a long-running operation, with an email paper trail going back two years.
Who ate the losses? (Score:2)
Credit card fraud has been the bane of previous micropayment-ish systems. I remember in particular the defunct Fundable, which was Kickstarter before Kickstarter appeared. People would start various junk collection projects, fund them with stolen credit cards, and take the payout of "good" money from Fundable.
The problem is that instead of security on their end, credit card companies solve the problem of fraud by making the merchants pay. When credit cards get cancelled, transaction gets reversed, but that'
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So, Twitch/Amazon must have been eating the losses on this for a while. I guess it finally grew too big a problem to ignore.
TFS says that losses "could total an estimated $9.8 million" which is like 69 (nice!) minutes of Bezos' time (est. $142,667/minute [yahoo.com]).
So many places to do such (Score:2)
I am sure that twitch is not the only place this type of thing happens, things like gofundme and kickstarter come to mind.
Doesn't seem like a very smart scam (Score:2)
Also blatantly obvious and traceable (Score:2)
Are these people completely stupid?
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Remember where the story comes from. Until it is independently verified, I won't trust that it isn't Erdogan going after some perceived hobgoblins of his fevered imagination.
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Yes, possibly.
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Someone is.
May not be the fraudsters though. Could be the classic scam where they put out an ad asking for someone to process funds. Basically a "Wanted: Someone to manage a Twitch channel. Send 80% of revenue to this address, the rest is your pay."
People fall for that money-laundering scam (or then similar reshipper scam) all the time.
The "employee" is left holding the bag. While the original fraudster has quickly moved the funds again to keep them from being
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Well, yes. One of the many things that clearly shows most people have no clue how things work in the real world.