Mail order return scams

[MattGSX]

I posted this a while back in the SE section, but I want to know what people think about this, risk wise.

Find a company that specializes in catalog/mail-order sales without a middleman/vendor, or even one that does.

With said company, set up two accounts using two completely different sets of information (addresses, ph #'s, CCs if possible. Make sure this is all real stuff, as you don't one getting shut down prematurely for fraud)

Place one order under each account, one order being fairly expensive items, the other order being fairly cheap items. Have these packages shipped to different addresses, under different names.

Contact the company, complaining that you recieved the wrong items for order #1 - the expensive ones. Ship back the items from order #2 as the "wrong items"

Get refunded the cost of the items from order #1.

Either keep the extra merchandise, sell it, or take it to a store and return it.


If anyone understood that-
-What do you think the bust risk is? (Assuming some paranoid phreak like me isn't the one answering phones for customer complaints)
-What action do you think a company will take in handling one such situation?


Consider this an "Is it worth it?" challenge. If you can get actual security/lp procedures from companies, all the better.

[frog]

I don't know what would be done to you; but wasn't it in the original post that some guy did get busted for this? I think that hints at the risk right there.

[MattGSX]

The original post also pointed out that he made a stupid mistake in his execution and didn't keep his shit straight and had a common linker other than his name in all situations (a phone #).



Update. I talked to a couple of law students and a manager at my job about this. This is fraud, plain and simple, but a lot of mail-order places won't press charges or try too hard to get the person busted.

Why?
One- Mail-order outfits look shady enough. They don't need negative press about people scamming them and possibly scaring away other potential customers. Most people see scam and avoid that business like the plague, no matter what the scam is.
Two- The business really isn't going to get their money lost back unless they manage to retrieve the money/marchandise from the scammer. That isn't too likely. Why spend the money on lawyers when you can instead spend it on training your own employees better?

[.]

The problem will be if they scan the barcodes and link that to a database with all the addresses it might work the first time assuming it was a human mistake but after that they will start getting suspicious (I would) and tracking all this; pretty simple to do if you use only one IP (or similar) for the log in.
Besides that, somebody will get fired if they ever figure this out and that would be rubbish.

About you and Frog, GUYS GET A ROOM!

[MattGSX]

FB, this would be mail-order, not web-based. Also, most mail-order outfits don't create barcodes with that kind of data. Doing so would require customized decoders (or bar-code readers, or UPC scanners) for a returns department, and since none of this shit is point-of-sale (POS register transactions), it's pointless to have them. Instead, items are typically invoiced, and the returns department just looks at the invoice and the labels on the items (if the labels are still there).

A better explanation of this whole scheme is on a similarly-entitled post in the Hack, Phreak, SE section of the boards.

[.]

 Is just that I work with RMA and we store all the addresses with the replacement we send, and similar things happened to us before and most of the times we just tell them "go to hell" unless the guy calls the main office and make a huge scene about the whole thing and then we do send a second replacement.
Give it a try if you want to, but I assume that they will be prepared for something like that; and as I said before I hardly think this will work more than a couple of times.


If it does, please send me a step by step PDF, I want a new PS3