> So I told them, ‘If you’re saying you can’t say whether I did receive the funds, tell me where they went?’ And they said, “Oh, no, we can’t do that.’ So I can’t clear myself and they won’t clear me.”<p>I had the same with Verizon after someone opened a wireless account in my name. After supplying all the documentation they asked for, they came back to me, "our investigation believes the account was not opened fraudulently" (i.e. that they were saying that the account, and credit tradeline, were in fact mine).<p>"So what documents did I use to open this account?"
"We can't tell you, for privacy reasons."
"Did you verify my identity at the start of this call?"
"Yes."
"And you're saying your investigation believes that I opened the account."
"Yes."
"So I can't see my own documents in order to protect my privacy?"
"Well... in case the account isn't yours... umm, ahh..."
"..."
"..."
This feels like some sort of scam but it's not clear what the purpose would be:<p>G.J. Blokdijk is the 'author' of thousands of medical titles:
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&field-author=G.J.+Blokdijk&text=G.J.+Blokdijk&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&fie...</a><p>Gerardus Blokdijk gets more than 40,000 hits for computer-related titles apparently generated by template:
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Gerardus+Blokdyk&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Gerardus+Blokdyk&i=stripbooks&ref...</a>
Not so much laundering the money, but rather obscuring the trail between the crime and the money. Laundering would come afterwards, I presume.<p>Ok, so to pull this of, you need to:<p>1. have one or more stolen credit cards (obviously not on your name)<p>2. sell a book under a false name and buy it with the stolen credit card<p>3. have a bank account somewhere either under the false name from 2. or under some other false name or with a bank that will never give out your real name<p>So the money is not "clean" because it now rests inside a bank account with a false name or a bank that does not cooperate with authorities. In any case it is still somewhat shady.
notice how amazon gift cards go for higher than face value on ebay<p><a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=amazon+gift+card&_sacat=0&rt=nc&LH_Sold=1&LH_Complete=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=amazon+gift+c...</a><p>My only logic is that its a form of money laundering.
This still seems to be happening two years later. A person complained about seeing a book sold under their name for 550 USD. It contained gibberish and the sales were recorded as income to the IRS even though the owner of the account couldn't find out where the money went. Amazon wouldn't tell her who had opened a bank account in her name. I suppose they prefer to deal with such accounts behind the scenes.
I know Patrick Reams- he is a semi well known ‘thought leader’/speaker in my industry. (Energy and Commodity markets) interesting to see what comes of this. What scares me is that somehow amazon knows where to send the 1099 but for whatever reason can’t let him access his account or otherwise verify his financial institution details? This doesn’t add up to me.
instead of using stolen credit cards wouldn't you instead have people bring their cash to get Amazon credit at a store, pay them 10 dollars per 450 dollars, they buy 'your' book with amazon credit, you've laundered 450 dollars for 10 dollars and some small expenses related to fake book generation etc.
So odd question if anyone can answer. Did Amazon already have the author's information ( and hence the 1099 ) or did the fraudster submit it ( in which case, why did he give the correct address )?
Given that some of the titles have 1-star reviews, I think the goal is to scam people into buying expensive crap. The books are auto generated and the content is worthless.<p>In many countries it’s difficult to request refunds for online payments, especially if it was clear what you were buying. There’s a look inside button you can use to see a large selection of pages.<p>He generated so many books probably to cover all kinds of tech topics, to reach more victims.
An investor, Meb Faber, has written on this topic several times (2018):<p>> Why All My Books Are Now Free (aka A Lesson in Amazon Scams and Money Laundering)<p><a href="https://mebfaber.com/2018/04/18/how-to-launder-money-with-amazon-aka-why-all-my-books-are-now-free/" rel="nofollow">https://mebfaber.com/2018/04/18/how-to-launder-money-with-am...</a>
Just fraud, not laundering. They're solving the problem of how to effectively cash out credit cards. Selling items in someone else's platform has multiple upsides:<p>1. it's a large trusted platform, so the victim's bank is less likely to freeze the transactions<p>2. multiple items with arbitrary pricing means maxing out each card is simpler<p>3. the platform will likely have to eat the charge-backs, so where ever the seller receives money from Amazon is relatively safe for a while to further convert into crypto or whatever<p>4. because of the size of the platform you can keep creating new accounts indefinitely - they cannot possibly vet all new sellers - this is probably where the stolen identities for authors come in. Amazon must be doing some basic sanity checks / credit score lookups or something similar - hence they need real peoples names / SSNs.<p>I've seen similar things on app stores / freelancer sites etc. Yes, the accounts get flagged after a while, but there's usually enough time to cash out and creating a new one isn't that hard.