Questionable 6TB Drives

[BlueFox]

If you don't mind sharing, what tipped you off that this was the case? It would be nice to know for future transactions and dialogue with the other sellers.

From looking at his feedback for sales it all seems good for similar or the same 2x 6 TB hard drives. While I agree the 15 day lead time seems shady, as well as the price, his feedback for sold hdd items looks legit.

Their older listings mentioned to contact them first if you wanted higher quantities, so I did. They mentioned needing multiple addresses to ship stuff due to their ordering system having quantity limits per customer per quarter (3 month period). I declined and they indicated that they could make it work with a single address involving typographical errors and package redirection after shipping.

What I could make from this is that they have access to a large list of serial numbers (maybe from their day job?) and are abusing WD's advance RMA. Packages get drop shipped directly from WD to you, hence the positive feedback because people do indeed get drives, however they'd be using stolen credit cards for said RMA and would never ship anything to WD.

It works very well because you never know who they, the scammer, are in terms of name or address and because the unsuspecting buyer gets the product in the end, the scheme keeps going. Damn near impossible to trace them either if they use a VPN, tor, or the likes for ordering too. If I were them, I wouldn't have a name on the PayPal account and would just buy BTC with it and then cash out. Brilliant way to effectively print money since the scam has no overhead less paying for some stolen credit card numbers.

 

[croakz]

Saw this on my local Craigslist, wonder if they were related.

Western Digital Hard Drives for sale WHOLESALE BULK PURCHASE PREFERRED

 

[BlueFox]

Hah, wow, yeah, that seems like exactly the same person. This line stood out:

10 2TB Passport Slim (free gifts)

They offered me exactly one of those to 'sweeten' the deal when I was interested in a bunch of drives.

So much easier to deal with stolen property when you get cash I presume? No paper trail after all. Wonder if they go so far as to ship them to vacant homes and collect from there. I've heard of that being done before. Shame there probably isn't anything we can do to report them?

 

[Boddy]

@james23 that's how the scam works, buyers get their goods I believe @Patrick posted about it on this forum a bit ago.

The links in the post are very informative:

Scammers using Ebay and Amazon Elastic Cloud service

Cheers

 

[izx]

Fascinating reveal. Another giveaway is the 90-120 day warranty. That is the default on WD advanced RMA units, but they will bump it to remainder-of-original+90 a little while after they they receive the original bad drive. No return = you get stuck with the initial 90-day warranty.

My concern is if this is large scale enough to make WD change their relatively liberal advanced RMA process; it's helped me out often enough.

 

[RobertFontaine]

The more obvious question is why has no one notified ebay.

 

[T_Minus]

I believe it's because:
1. Customers get their items.
and
2. You can't prove that it's a scam unless you buy the stolen property yourself, and then do research on the serial # to find out more info from the drive, which still may point to a refurb unit that has a 'history' but no real proof.

 

[modder man]

What he said. Exactly what I was thinking. As much as it is obvious to us that something is up there we don't have solid proof.

 

[Boddy]

It's not helpful that traders in EBay can trade under a different name to their real name or business name.
This helps out the scammers.

Otherwise with triangular fraud, the receipt details would not match the sellers name.
Who knows what the sellers real name is in EBay as they can trade in EBay under alias names?

 

[RobertFontaine]

If you have a shill selling for you and you are anonymous then it is pretty easy to hide through Bitcoin BUT the front man is easy to take off line and/or prosecute. EBay is very aware of the scam and would almost certainly investigate suspicious activity and real people move their paypal money to bank accounts or other financial instruments so that they can spend the money. I'm not sure whether law enforcement has much motivation to investigate these kinds of frauds but it has a negative impact on EBay's reputation which gives them motivation to put together a nice a package with a bow on it for anyone willing to prosecute.

 

[BlueFox]

The more obvious question is why has no one notified ebay.

I think eBay turns a blind eye because they still get their cut in terms of fees and that it would be quite difficult to prove that they are in fact using stolen credit cards without engaging every company that's a victim.