Efforts to exploit retailers’ return programs are growing more organized, fueled by websites and messaging accounts that target merchants
By Liz Young of The WSJ.
"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."
