Randall Stross reports:
It’s easier to steal a million dollars a dollar at a time than a million dollars once. So goes an old saying.
If the allegations in a civil case filed in a federal court in Chicago hold up, you can even haul off $10 million if you stick to $9 here or 20 cents there.
The suit, filed in March by the Federal Trade Commission, contends that over at least four years, scammers placed more than $10 million in bogus charges on consumers’ credit and debit cards. Then, the suit says, they moved the money to bank accounts in Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Cyprus and Kyrgyzstan. The suit was filed in United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
[…]
According to the suit, the scammers used more than 100 names for their merchant accounts, names that might have looked vaguely familiar. If you tried to call the toll-free number that was listed, you would not have reached a human being. But the amount in question was so small that you might have shrugged when you failed to receive a call back after leaving a message.
Read more in the New York Times.