Amazon scam trio primed for prison stretch after million-dollar fraud

a hard life with security checks,

I'll hope you mean a long time in prison. For all the fraud they did, I think they got off rather light.

They slipped up

From a brief skim of the court documents, it looks like they were buying Amazon gift cards to make the purchases, thinking the items couldn't be traced to them - presumably they were being delivered to vacant houses so the shipping address couldn't be connected with them but I didn't read that far.

However, they were dumb enough to use a debit card to buy the Amazon gift cards at a grocery store, and presumably that debit account or other purchases made with it were able to be connected with them. If they'd bought the gift cards with cash they'd probably still be doing it at least so long as there were enough vacant houses for them to use for delivery addresses for their fake accounts (and that their access to amazon.com was suitably cloaked via multiple VPNs, Tor or the like)

Once again, criminals think they are smart but really aren't smart enough to think through all the details of their plan and leave an obvious trail to get caught. And once I wonder how many criminals there are out there who are smart enough to do all the things I outlined here, and perhaps other things I didn't take into account, who have been running scams like this for years and never got caught.

From selling on ebay myself i understand that returning small items costing < £10 that customers claim are faulty it is often easier to refund than ask for a customer to return them. The costs in paying for the return often being more than the item is worth.

Although if i suspect someone is trying to pull a scam I will pay for the return costs, had someone claim an item was broken - worth about £40 - he claimed he had no facilities to send me any photos or videos of the item and was demanding an immediate refund.

I smelled a rat on this occasion and said I would arrange for the item to be collected by a courier "He wasn't going to wait around for a courier to collect". Offered that he could take it to the Post office and I would reimburse him for the postage costs "He had no way of getting to the post office as it was too far away" (I checked and it was about 5 minute walk from the address where the item was delivered to and the item wasn't big or heavy)

In the end after a lot of messages backwards and forwards he said he had managed to 'fix' the item and closed the return. But perhaps similar tactics work with Amazon, say you have no way of returning the item and kick up enough fuss and they just let you keep the items even if they are more expensive ones.

Joke sentences

Crime does pay...

Amazon Freebie

Well this will go on social media, then a lot of Amazon "FreeBies" will occur, kinda soon..