DEFCONConference
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2020–2025
19:55 · 597K views · Nov 16, 2019
At DEF CON 27, Nina Kollars tells how buying Nespresso capsules on eBay led her to investigate fraudsters reselling goods bought with stolen credit cards. She describes her non-technical tracking and reporting efforts.
HN points to it as an entertaining and informative explanation of the economics of reshipping and stolen-card resale scams.
7 comments from Hacker News
In addition to the other commenters, here's an excellent defcon talk on what these some groups do: Nina Kollars - Confessions of an Nespresso Money Mule - DEF CON 27 Conference this video Essentially, they wait for a buyer of a product to come along to a listing and order it - they'll then buy it using stolen credentials, have it drop-shipped or reshipped to the end user. Everyone but the person with the original card comes out ahead, which is then pushed to all of us via higher fees if they notice and report the fraud.
Nina Kollars gave an interesting talk on scammers selling coffee through eBay using stolen credit cards. Signature way of knowing is they're shipped direct from nespresso and the purchase price is 40-50% cheaper than retail. I ordered some keurig pods and experienced the same direct shipping and cheap prices. this video
Nina Kollars had a nice related talk during Defcon on a similar scam buying what she thought was gray market Nespresso pods whose "seller" bought for her using a stolen credit card. They also gave her a free Nespresso machine, presumably to give her motive to keep quiet. this video
Here's a tangentially related def con about the strange economics of that whole scam. Basically, everyone in the chain apart from the cardholder benefits. this video
3P mule accounts have been a thing on eBay for years and eBay has been very much aware of it since at least 2015 when Brian Krebs wrote about it. [LINK] See also Confessions of a Nespresso Money Mule by Nina Kollars. this video In 2020, I personally reported 150+ hijacked eBay accounts used to commit $160k+ in triangulation fraud against a company I worked for at the time - eBay did very little to help. In February 2022, I collected about 80 reports from people who received 1099-Ks from eBay even though they had never knowingly created an account on the site - their PII (names, addresses, and in some cases even correct SSNs) were used to create fraudulent accounts that sold tens of thousands of dollars each with no vetting or verification of any kind by eBay. And all of that is a tiny drop in the bucket. I place a lot of the blame for where we are, and why this legislation ever came to be, squarely on the marketplaces. They've known about rampant fraud and scams for years, could have put in stricter vetting and verification procedures, invested more in highly trained human powered Trust & Safety to deal with counterfeits and fraud etc. but for the most part they have done the minimum required to cover their own "assets" and nothing more...which still left room for a lot of consumer harm to be done. While I don't think this will curb all of the fraud, like you said they will likely just jump to new accounts, having to produce actual documents to match the stolen PII may at least