Topic: Heads-Up: Bank Fraud Alert - page 3. (Read 7885 times)

Ok, Keyur is using "accounts", which is plural.


Ok, Yankee is using "account", which is singular.


No wait, ... that's plural.

Oh ... so maybe is Yankee bringing in stuff from last July into this conversation?  Or is that referring to today's activity?

Essentially, this is what happend to us, MtGox, CampBX, Crypto and to TradeHill

Someone stole the identity of a US citizens, opened up bank accounts.

Use that account to verify Dwolla, (Since they have fake ID's and access to the account) and in small amounts used the exchanges to buy Bitcoin.

Once the account owner realized (Weeks later!) that funds were being taken account of their account, they call the bank and claim fraud. (Most of the compromised accounts were trusts, or lawyer accounts which are rarely checked...ironically)

They sign an affidavit, and the banks reverse all the charges from Dwolla. Dwolla then pulls the money from the merchants...and we get screwed.

Right now, Dwolla is very cooperative, and works with us. They changed their whole system around to deal with these things.

However..this was not always the case.

When it first started happening, mostly to TradeHill, Dwolla would reverse the transactions and change TradeHill's statements to cover their asses. Chargebacks were NEVER in Dwolla's TOS until later on. I told Jered to start downloading the statements after after transaction, and all of a sudden we started noticing transactions disappearing from them! (I've seen ALL the evidence, TradeHill really did get screwed...BAD)

Dwolla then changed their TOS, and started cooperating with merchants, thinking they can get away with it.

CD,
     Yes - I didn't make that clear in a rush to get the message out.  Just in last couple of hours we received several thousand dollars more from what seems like compromised accounts. 

InterSango and BitInstant are okay, but seems like one other exchange is going to take a big loss on this one.

Keyur

do u mean they're transferring stolen USD's to exchanges to buy Bitcoin?

Sorry to learn of the financial loss incurred by this.  Thank you for being diligent and also for sharing what you've learned.

PS: All this info is from the bank investigator.  Dwolla so far is reacting like a deer in headlights.

Hi everyone,
          A couple of days ago we noticed some suspicious transfers to CampBX, and reported those to our bank as well as Dwolla.  After talking to bank fraud investigators today, seems like there is a well orchestrated, large-scale bank fraud underway.  This includes very convincing fake passports and utility bills used to open bank accounts and Dwolla accounts, and transferring money to Bitcoin companies.  Bank customers who have been hacked are spread all over geographically: MA, CA, TN, NYC, and WI.

         The old-fashioned practice of processing bank+Dwolla transactions manually mostly saved CampBX: We have lost $2.6K and prevented a loss of $9.8K so far.  I don't have email IDs for newer exchanges so sending out this open heads-up on the forum.  I believe BitInstant does manual processing, so their damage may be limited, but exchanges like Mt.Gox that do automatic processing of Dwolla may be at higher risk.  (Unless the fraudsters are selling their coins on Mt.Gox - in that case they will make a nice profit).

Keyur