PSA: Rapha on eBay

[cgolvin]

TL;DR: The current great eBay deals on brand new Rapha gear are the result of credit card fraud.

Fellow Rapha enthusiast dbnm alerted me to a great eBay deal: brand new Pro Team Training bibs $125 BIN. After vacillating because it was a zero feedback seller, he took a flyer. What arrived was clearly a legit Rapha product, in legit packaging, from their distribution center in Hebron KY, including his name on a return shipping label. Strange.

The explanation is that these eBay sellers (there are many listings now, e.g. this one) take your payment then use a stolen credit card to place an order on rapha.cc and ship (with 2 day upgrade, how kind) to you.

I'm sure this is a common scheme for etailers, especially those selling premium products. I know there are both Rapha lovers and haters here, but based on my buy/sell experience they are all ethical folks who wouldn't want to screw Rapha just to get a great deal.

Hope y'all get a good long Memorial Day ride in.

[R3awak3n]

another one here -

https://www.ebay.com/itm/new-season-...Iuye4KpleKmycg


yikes. no thanks and thanks for posting Charles.

[dbnm]

and check the feedback on that one

[dbnm]

Here are the obvious ones

https://www.ebay.com/usr/merc-7288?_...p2047675.l2559

https://www.ebay.com/usr/economy36?_...p2047675.l2559

https://www.ebay.com/usr/wiluec-0?_t...p2047675.l2559

https://www.ebay.com/usr/farda44?_trksid=p2047675.l2559

https://www.ebay.com/usr/judyann-195...p2047675.l2559

https://www.ebay.com/usr/ianbrook_29...p2047675.l2559

https://www.ebay.com/usr/gerardore-2...p2047675.l2559

https://www.ebay.com/usr/irkope0?_trksid=p2047675.l2559

https://www.ebay.com/usr/submi50?_trksid=p2047675.l2559

7 of the 9 all joined ebay in May 2018.

[charliedid]

I don't get it.

How are they making $ ?

[dbnm]

Originally Posted by charliedid

I don't get it.

How are they making $ ?

They use a stolen credit card to pay Rapha.

They list the item on ebay and you pay them.

The item is then sent from Rapha to the ebay buyer.

[charliedid]

Originally Posted by dbnm

They use a stolen credit card to pay Rapha.

They list the item on ebay and you pay them.

The item is then sent from Rapha to the ebay buyer.

Ah I get it.

Thanks

[CSTRider]

Can Rapha contact the receiver of goods to request return of goods or proper payment?

[pbarry]

They aren't lightning fast, but they do pull fraudulent listings.

[cgolvin]

Originally Posted by CSTRider

Can Rapha contact the receiver of goods to request return of goods or proper payment?

I think they only get physical address info of the recipient so they'd have to do it via a letter, seems unlikely to yield a good result. I doubt that such a buyer would be willing to pay full freight, which means they'd then have to return the goods to Rapha and initiate a return with the fraudster.

[ScottW]

Seems like simple CC fraud that should have been caught by Rapha and/or the CC companies before the merch was shipped out, since the shipping address/es will not match the billing address/es of the stolen card/s. Is there a more innovative scheme at play, or were all of the fraud monitors on vacation this week?

[Jaybee]

Shipping/billing address dissonance isn't of itself sufficient to demonstrate CC fraud. For example, I usually send my family their birthday presents every year direct from wherever I purchase it from, billed to my CC at my house. No vendor ever seems to care about this.

[jimoots]

Originally Posted by ScottW

Seems like simple CC fraud that should have been caught by Rapha and/or the CC companies before the merch was shipped out, since the shipping address/es will not match the billing address/es of the stolen card/s. Is there a more innovative scheme at play, or were all of the fraud monitors on vacation this week?

This scam has been around a few years now and typically focuses on high value items that can be deeply discounted while still returning a decent payday for the scammer, per sale.

This is really hard to pick up on before the fact without having heaps of false positives.

That is - having different shipping and billing recipient is a legitimate business case. Nothing wrong with that.

Sometimes you can see the transaction is being made a distance away from the billing/shipping address(es) but again this isn’t always indicative of fraud, and isn’t always the case, and can be worked around with VPN/proxies.

You’d also be surprised at how unsophisticated most merchant (ie rapha) payment gateways are.

Additionally a competitive tension in this situation is that many fraud protection measures act to reduce sales conversion. So lax fraud protection on Rapha’s part may be a conscious decision to maximise sales and eat the fraud.

Ultimately Rapha is the one who will lose here. When the stolen cardholder reports the transaction, the bank gives the cardholder their money back and claws back the funds from Rapha.

Source: I work in e-commerce. We got stung by this 3 years ago and had to implement both software based and manual processes to overcome this sort of a scam.

[MattTuck]

What's the old saying, "You can't con an honest man" or something like that...

What Jimmy says above is a bummer, since Rapha is apparently the one that gets conned.

[jimoots]

Originally Posted by MattTuck

What's the old saying, "You can't con an honest man" or something like that...

What Jimmy says above is a bummer, since Rapha is apparently the one that gets conned.

We only discovered it because we went to having 1-2 chargebacks per month (under $1000) to having $15k.

There's a high chance that Rapha wouldn't even notice it, because their velocity of sales is massive.

I should probably reach out to a contact I have there!