DJs Buy Their Own Music Online With Stolen Credit Cards To Grab Royalties
from the scheming dept
A group of people in the UK have been arrested after they allegedly put their own music on the iTunes Music Store and Amazon, then purchased it with stolen credit-card numbers. Police say they made 19 tracks and put them up in the shops, then spent about $750,000 on the music, grabbing about $330,000 in royalties from the purchases. It's quite the scam, since one difficulty in stealing credit-card numbers is converting them into cash. One way to do this is to sell the numbers themselves; another common way for people to do this is to take a stolen card, then go buy gift cards from a store with it, then sell the cards on the street at a discount. But selling Wal-Mart gift cards and hawking them on the street seems like an awful lot of work, compared to what a criminal with a computer and some music software can do. Of course, it's not too smart to continually buy the same tracks over and over with 1,500 stolen cards...Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: music, royalties, scams, stolen credit cards
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Buy a few gift cards from different stores, buy some of your own music a few times + random music to cover your tracks, then sell the credit card number to someone else.
The problem with criminals is they're too greedy. If they had only spent say $200,000 on their own music and an equal or greater amount on 'noise music' for ~$100k profit they might have gotten away with it.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Gold Record?
They would stand out on those lists like a sore thumb.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Gold Record?
That just leads to more sales for the DJ Cabal. You're assuming too much after the fact because this scam has been uncovered.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]