This week’s Secret Crime Fighter discovered another clever scheme involving credit card collusion between buyers and sellers, likely as a means of money laundering.

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The Typology

Onboarding

Our Secret Crime Fighter onboarded seemingly unrelated businesses, who claimed to be selling printed marketing materials to various local businesses. Once the sellers had successfully created merchant services accounts, they began taking card present transactions in low amounts, across a small number of cards.

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Change in activity

After they had built a seemingly low risk payment history, the transaction amounts increased significantly, averaging £2-3k. Only a small number of cards were used, indicating a small number of customers, but each card was charged frequently, indicating a surprisingly high volume of repeat orders relative to the size of the companies involved. Even though the payments were allegedly from businesses, no business cards were being used.

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The sellers claimed to be managing both the printing and delivery of the marketing materials, allowing them to take card payments with the customers present despite not having a brick and mortar business location. However, by looking at the geolocation and IP addresses, our Secret Crime Fighter identified that the location of the payments was static, instead of varying for each customer as would be expected if the payments were being taken at each customer’s place of business.

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Stopping the Typology

After an account was flagged for review, our Secret Crime Fighter was able to investigate the seller's claims and determine they were not inline with the actual activity. Thanks to a culture of sharing trends across the team, they were then able to detect and stop other accounts with similar patterns of behaviour.

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Thanks for reading our latest Secret Crime Fighters newsletter. If you have an interesting typology that you’d like to share, we’d love to hear about it! Please email us at [email protected].