U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels
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U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
zucked · · focus · HN ↗
Here's how it went down:
<a href="https://www.ebay.com/fdbk/feedback_profile/theperfectpart" rel="nofollow">https://www.ebay.com/fdbk/feedback_profile/theperfectpart
Note that they’ve sold so much that even 1k neutral ratings are barely registering - they have “100% positive feedback”
I bought a cheap tool from this seller on ebay. Tracking number was provided showing my town as the destination. About four days later, I get an unprompted ebay message from the seller: “I monitor all my shipments and sometimes there are problems so I’m proactively sending you a new one, here’s a new tracking number.”
The original tracking number showed a message I’d never seen before “Item seized - counterfeit postage”. The new tracking number showed postage that had been bought back in January, but never entered the mailstream. Huh. I suspect that buys them time while they re-ship.
I did eventually get the item after another tracking number was provided.
My suspicion is that the seller uses counterfit USPS postage on 'x' number of packages to juice their margins. If you look at the neutral reviews, you can see a pattern — slow postage, lost package, had to replace, blah blah. Look at the positives — rave reviews at how fast things are arriving. Probably because the seller is “paying” for higher end postage via scamming the USPS.
And only when they get caught by USPS do they need to re-ship an item. They must get away with it enough to make it worthwhile
neilv · · focus · HN ↗
A third-party seller on Amazon or eBay was including sheets of suspicious US postage stamps in product shipments, unsolicited, with full-color glossy notes offering more stamps in exchange for positive reviews.
(I took the stamps and note I received to a post office, where a manager agreed they looked suspicious, and I asked them forward it up the chain. I like the USPS as a trustworthy service and institution, and I hate counterfeiting.)
kulahan · · focus · HN ↗
He would buy a stamp in Spain for 30 centavos, then exchange it for a 5 cent stamp in the US. Spain’s currency was depreciating against the dollar, so you could make some surprising returns. Really, his numbers weren’t straight-up lies, it’s just that it would’ve been impractical at the time to transport enough stamps to make that payout occur.
filmgirlcw · · focus · HN ↗
But he NEVER did anything legal. In fact, he didn’t even receive his first attempt at successfully buying a small number of international reply coupons from a friend in Italy until his scam unraveled. And he’d never figured out how he could turn those coupons into cash.
And the reason his arbitrage excuse was caught so quickly (it was basically one summer that he was able to run his scam before his money ran out), was because the global supply of all the international reply coupons in the world were valued at significantly less than his revenues from his schemes, a fact experts pointed out to the local papers as the scam was happening. In fact, he even stopped telling new investors about the postal reply coupons scheme and had moved on to other lies about how people could double their money so quickly.
kulahan · · focus · HN ↗