Dealing with Scammers

“We are having a birthday party for my mother, and I would like to order 100 pounds of ground beef. I will arrange for a truck to come pick it up from your farm next Wednesday if that is agreeable to you. Please reply.”

The first time a version of this email landed in the farm’s inbox we weren’t sure what to think about it. Alanna wrote back, explaining that we have everything needed to ship frozen meat, and that an order would have to be much more than one hundred pounds to make it worth sending a refrigerated truck all the way up here. The writer, however, was undeterred. He insisted that he wanted to pay someone he knew almost as much as the beef would cost to come pick it up.

It was, of course, a scam. If we had gone along with it he would have asked us to pay the trucking company and then bill him for the combined total of the meat and the trucking, a bill which he would never have paid or would have paid with a bad check. In the end he would have taken whatever money we paid the fake trucking company, no one would ever pick up the meat, and if he made a payment to us the bank would take it back for being fraudulent.

Over the years we’ve seen a few versions of this, sometimes slightly more plausible ones, in which the scammer has at least made an effort to be minimally convincing by pretending to be in New Jersey or on Long Island, sometimes less so, as when they ask us to ship a half ton of beef liver to somewhere in Micronesia. Like most scams, it promises a bigger payoff in exchange for a comparatively small upfront fee. The scammer pockets the fee and the payoff never materializes.

This year a more pernicious type of scam has occasionally targeted us in the form of orders placed with stolen credit cards. It is particularly annoying because, unlike most other scams, no amount of skepticism can totally prevent it. If you don’t deal with payment processors you may be unaware of how credit card fraud works, so here’s a quick overview.

When someone places an order with a stolen card, at first it looks totally normal, so the vendor will pack it up and mail it off. But when the rightful owner of the card or the bank that issued it spots the charge, they will initiate a chargeback. This removes the money from the account of the seller and also comes with a $15 fee. The result is that the store has lost whatever product it sold, plus the cost of shipping, plus the credit card processing fee, plus a penalty for incurring a chargeback.

If this seems very unfair to you, well, it seems pretty unfair to me too. It would make far more sense for banks and credit card companies to bear responsibility for ensuring that their products aren’t used fraudulently, and they should pay out when they fail to do so. But that’s not how the system works, so the only tool a small seller has to detect the use of stolen cards comes in the form of a risk assessment issued by the payment processor. When an order comes in it will occasionally be tagged with a notification that it has a high risk of fraud, at which point the seller has to decide whether or not to fulfill it.

Luckily, a huge order placed last week came with just such a warning. Rather than shipping it as normal, I emailed some follow up questions to the buyer, who responded that it was a birthday gift for her boyfriend. (I’m not sure why scammers mention birthdays so often. I suppose it is meant to sound innocent and also explain the difference between shipping and billing addresses.) I followed up with a request for some detailed information about the transaction, which I won’t detail here, both because it’s boring and because I’m now a little paranoid about revealing the specific safeguards I have in place.

In the end I cancelled the order, but in the days since I’ve been surprised by how much it has continued to bother me. What, I wonder, do the people trying to buy with stolen cards tell themselves? Maybe they think the banks eat the charges, making it a victimless crime. Maybe they think sellers have insurance. Maybe they just don’t care one way or the other. 

I count myself extremely lucky to be in the business of selling high quality meat to a relatively small geographic area. I can only imagine what a headache this type of stuff is for someone who ships more mainstream goods nationally, whereas for me it has only been a minor issue, at least until this week.

But it does have me thinking about how even the largest, most opaque systems still rely on some basic level of decency. The ease and convenience of online shopping only works because most people aren't out to steal. There's some credit card fraud, and there's some amount of lifting packages off front porches, but for now, such activities are rare enough that the whole thing is worth doing. Who can say if that will always be the case.