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Buying online may seem like a safe practice. However, it is not without risks and, as the security measures of banks and large e-commerce stores progress, the picaresque of Internet scammers does. Some cyber criminals who have found in a large online store like Amazon a panacea to carry out their scams .

For this, cyber-scalers can even use expired credit cards . Obsolete cards that, however, serve to make purchases online.

Once this is done, they opt for a standard shipment of the products to the address of the legitimate cardholder. However, they intercept the package before it arrives at its recipient.

This occurs because the credit that users enter in large online stores (such as Amazon) can continue to make purchases (and spending money from their rightful owner) even though they are expired .

A ruse due to the large framework agreements between banks and large virtual stores in the world, which allow purchases to be made even when the card is expired , if so agreed between the two parties.

Thus, a merchant has an agreement with a card issuer and agrees to take a risk, "they can give them the green light to use cards that are technically not considered valid, " as explained by consumer expert Clark Howard on the Life Hacker website.

Companies are perfectly aware of the existence of this fraud. However, they get to account because the money lost in these types of scams is a tiny part compared to the amount of money they earn allowing purchases with an expired card. " The system is established knowing that there may be some fraud, " says Howard.

In addition, Howard notes that those who perpetrate these scams online " generally know which companies are willing to take the risk , such as Amazon, and which are not."

When the scammer finds an expired card that works, he places an order on the cardholder's name and tracks every step of the package. When it arrives, the scammer or one of his cronies will pick up the order. However, if they become clueless, cardholder users will start receiving products they have not purchased.

Other similar scams

This form of fraud has some similarities with respect to others known as brushing , whereby an external online seller of a platform like Amazon buys its own products through fake buyer accounts, while the products are sent to a real address . Afterwards, the seller writes a positive review about his item from the fake buyer's account, but under the 'verified purchase' brand. With this technique, you can boost your ranking .

To avoid this type of fraud, experts recommend combining all our purchases online on the same credit card. In this way, it will be easier to maintain control over which products we have bought and which ones we have not.

They also recommend using programs that generate single-use credit card numbers for each time a purchase is made online. In this way, even if the card number is compromised, it will be useless to make new purchases.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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