14 DAY TRIAL // The Federal Trade Commission has halted the operations of an international identity theft ring that managed to fly under the radar for years. The scheme involved charging the credit cards of over a million consumers with amounts less than $10 and using dummy companies to route the payments.
The fraudsters used stolen identities to open over one hundred merchant accounts with credit card processors. The gang went to great lengths to make their operation as stealthy as possible. The FTC reports that in order to trick the card processing companies, each of the merchant accounts were provided with its own address, a business, home and toll-free phone numbers, a website appearing to sell legit products and a real company's tax number obtained from the Internet.
The operation also involved tricking at least fourteen people into working as money mules under the cover of U.S. finance manager jobs with international financial services companies. Their responsibilities involved forming companies and associated bank accounts, receiving the fraudulent credit card payments and transferring the money through them to countries like Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, or Kyrgyzstan.
The FTC filed a case in Illinois against the sixteen dummy companies set up by the money mules and the still unknown fraudsters coordinating the operation, who are most likely based overseas. The court froze their assets in the United States and issued an injunction ordering them to cease operations.
The authorities don't know how the fraudsters obtained the details of over one million credit cards, but explained that they managed to get away with it for four years because of the unusual nature of the fraudulent charges. „Most consumers either didn’t notice the charges on their bills or didn’t seek chargebacks because of the small amounts – charges ranged from 20 cents to $10. Consumers who called the toll-free numbers that appeared on their bills either found them disconnected or heard recorded messages instructing them to leave a message, but no calls were returned,” the FTC said in an official announcement.
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