Brian Krebs continues his excellent investigative series on the inner workings of online ripoffs, today with a deep look at underground freight-forwarders, so-called "Drops for stuff." These services use patsies recruited on Craigslist through a "work at home" scam to receive goods bought with stolen credit card numbers and forward them on to crooks.
A typical drop will receive and reship between two and four packages per day. The packages arrive with prepaid shipping labels that are paid for with stolen credit card numbers, or with hijacked online accounts at FedEx and the US Postal Service. Drops are responsible for inspecting and verifying the contents of shipments, attaching the correct shipping label to each package, and sending them off via the appropriate shipping company.
One drops operation, dropforrent.net, allows “clients” to “rent” drops who have signed up for reshipping jobs. “Managers,” those who facilitate drop recruitment scams, can earn money by purchasing merchandise that the reshipping operation can quickly resell. Most reshipping operations seek consumer electronics that can be easily sold for cash, including laptop computers, cameras, smart phones and parts for sports cars. Dropforrent.com pays managers and clients 30 percent of the value of laptops from ACER, HP, Toshiba, Dell, Compaq and Samsung, for example, and more than 40 percent of the retail price for Apple, Sony, VAIO, Canon and Nikon products.
