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...Filed Under: music, royalties, scams, stolen credit cards
