Efforts to exploit retailers’ return programs are growing more organized, fueled by websites and messaging accounts that target merchants
"Shoppers last year returned 17.6% of items they purchased online, valued at more than $247 billion and more than double the percentage of goods returned in 2019, according to the National Retail Federation and software provider Appriss Retail."
"Criminals are exploiting information gaps between retailers’ various departments, such as sales staff at stores, warehouse workers and online customer service representatives
"In some cases, fraudsters are returning knockoffs in place of designer goods and sending back boxes full of bricks or other filler rather than the original items. Others are manipulating shipping labels to receive a refund just from mailing back an empty envelope.
Industry experts say those tactics, including tips on exploiting the returns policies at specific retailers, are being shared across websites as well as groups on anonymous-messaging apps such as Telegram."
Fraudsters marketing their services on Telegram and through other websites often sell their services in return for a cut of customers’ refunds.
In one popular scheme, customers give the fraudsters their names, email addresses and order confirmation numbers for purchases made online. The fraudsters then go to a targeted retailer’s website and request a return label. They digitally manipulate the label to change the shipping address and apply the modified label to an empty envelope.
The parcel carrier who picks up the envelope scans the label, which sends a digital signal to the retailer that the piece of mail is on its way to the retailer’s warehouse. When the envelope is later delivered to the modified address, the parcel carrier’s online tracker shows the parcel was “delivered.”
The fraudsters then go online with the retailer’s customer service department and ask for the refund on the item. The support agents, who typically are far removed from the company’s warehouse operations, see online only that a package was “delivered” and release a refund to a given customer’s account, long before warehouse workers discover that no package actually arrived."
"people have also taken advantage of in-person return drop-off locations by bringing back used merchandise and knockoff items."
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Excerpts from "Rent a White Guy"
"Not long ago I was offered work as a quality-control expert with an American company in China I’d never heard of. No experience necessary—which was good, because I had none. I’d be paid $1,000 for a week, put up in a fancy hotel, and wined and dined in Dongying, an industrial city in Shandong province I’d also never heard of. The only requirements were a fair complexion and a suit.
“I call these things ‘White Guy in a Tie’ events,” a Canadian friend of a friend named Jake told me during the recruitment pitch he gave me in Beijing, where I live. “Basically, you put on a suit, shake some hands, and make some money. We’ll be in ‘quality control,’ but nobody’s gonna be doing any quality control. You in?”
I was.
And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.”
Six of us met at the Beijing airport, where Jake briefed us on the details. We were supposedly representing a California-based company that was building a facility in Dongying. Our responsibilities would include making daily trips to the construction site, attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and hobnobbing. During the ceremony, one of us would have to give a speech as the company’s director. That duty fell to my friend Ernie, who, in his late 30s, was the oldest of our group. His business cards had already been made."
"For the next few days, we sat in the office swatting flies and reading magazines, purportedly high-level employees of a U.S. company that, I later discovered, didn’t really exist."
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