I received a package (UPS) at work addressed to my business yesterday. It’s an oil filter from a company in California that sells oil filters. I know I didn’t order it, so I asked my employees assuming someone ordered it for their car/lawnmower/snowmobile/whatever. Turns out nobody ordered it.
I went to the company webpage and punched in the order number. Turns out it was paid in full by a woman in Maine; seven bucks for the filter and $50 for shipping. I’ve never been in Maine, but an employee was just there on her honeymoon.
The credit card last four digits are not mine. (nor my employee who was in Maine, she is calling her husband)
One possibility: to purchase an item from a proxy for yourself for an inflated shipping cost (which the scammers keep), using a stolen credit card, and the person who owns the card won’t figure it out because they don’t get the item.
Could also be a test of the card to see if it flags a review by the actual card owner or their card company. One of my credit cards got skimmed at a gas station, and the scammers put a whole bunch of little purchases on the card the first day: gas, a dollar store, lunch at a fast food place; before they went out the next day and tried to shop at a Best Buy.
Something innocuous and never properly delivered would be a perfect test to see if people actually review their card accounts online - it’s hard to imagine even a proactive card company would see that purchase as being questionable.
I’d usually think something like Lasciel describes, a test of a stolen card. But $50 for shipping is so far out of whack that I lean more toward Ludovic’s suggestion.
Nope, never ordered anything from them. Never would have.
I checked autozone, the same filter is available there for a dollar cheaper, plus no $50 shipping fee. The shipping should have been around $2.75, round up to three bucks. The company must be in on it.
“Coincidentally” (?) my employee drove through the exact town in Maine last week on her honeymoon (the purchaser’s address). Yet the card number isn’t one of theirs (and they are watching their cards now like hawks) and she says they never used her work address for anything on the trip. Weird!!
Yeah, that’s gotta be it. But did they pick my business out of a phone book, and coincidentally an employee just happened to pass through last week. Nobody else here has ever been to the state, let alone the small town.
The seller or their intermediate would be the scammer in this case. Odd that they picked your address instead of a non-existent one. Contact any credit card fraud unit about this.
Perhaps the shipping company would detect a lot of returns to a particular company. The credit card company would never know about it. But it seems like it’s all a prelude to something bigger than a $50 fee. One or more businesses might be lured into these transactions just to check to see if the card had already been reported stolen, they think it’s minor fraud for the inflated shipping fee, then one night all of the accounts get cleaned out in the real scam.
WAG, the employee’s card got stolen (it’s too odd of a coincedence). The last four of the card not matching could be for several reasons. Either because the company, as you said, is in on it so they changed them around to hide that it was her card (but that doesn’t explain why the item was shipped there) or some kind of tokenization and/or Samsung/Apple/Android pay that spoofs the number.
Personally, if I were you, the owner of the business, I’d advise her to either keep an eye on her card or get a new one and as for yourself, google the name of the company and see what you can find. I’d probably just end up tossing the filter in the garbage. If anything becomes of it, you could probably claim you never got it. Let them prove you received it, let them prove that’s your signature, let them prove UPS was at your door that day at that time…oh, it was left out front, must have been stolen. GPS said they were there, sure they weren’t next door?
Actually, I take that back
UPS’s rule about keeping unsolicited merchandise is actually a federal law. You can nicely (or not so nicely) tell them that they sent it to you and you get to keep it, sorry. By federal law, they can’t send you a bill, they require you to return it, they can’t do anything.
If there’s a scam going on, it could be that. You could get a call in a few days and use one tactic or another to get you to give them so money. Tell them to pound sand. You’ve got federal law on your side specifically because of this scam.
I was thinking that this could be a possibility, but thought the $10 it would actually cost for every mailing wouldn’t have a high enough hit ratio to justify this. But if it is, I’d suspect some form of overpayment for shipping it forward (i.e. sending $500 instead of $50 for shipping “accidentally”.)
Yeah, 50 bucks a shot is pretty small time for credit card fraud. And the chance of hitting a sucker who would pay it is pretty low also. I hope the OP can find out what happened and let us know.
I’d love to find out, but VISA isn’t making it easy for me. I’m trying to report fraud to VISA. Online, their options are all geared to someone with a card that has been messed with. They want you to notify your bank.
There are a bunch of different options, none that deal with my situation. I tried telephoning, and gave up after considerable (in my eyes) time. The phone tree assumes I am either the merchant or the cardholder.
As for the coincidence of your employee being through that town on her honeymoon, details from social media could have played a role. Posting a bunch of pictures with the town’s name could be filtered and if her accounts are pretty public, her workplace could be determined.
As for how the rest of the scam works, I got nothin’.
If the scam was perpetrated by the vendor why did they ship anything anywhere at all? They could have just charged spurious goods and shipping to a stolen card without doing anything else. Delivering something to somewhere other than the card holder’s address doesn’t let you know whether the card holder checked their statement. Beats me.
