ere is the story in regards to one of the recent credit card swiping scams.
Someone already mentioned the owners name S*****. He has a business reselling toners and other photo electronics.
He's been using people's credit cards for quite a number of years where he would use people's cards and pay the bills when they were due. He also had a lot of loans from loan sharks - paying 30% interest and paying over a year etc.
It reached a point where his business couldn't sustain the extreme amount of interest he was paying for swiping other people's credit cards.
He paid people to get him credit cards from other to swipe by him.
I know for a fact that he and his brother hounded people for credit cards when they already knew that things were going downhill, so all this talk that he's not a ganev, and didn't mean to screw anyone is a load of BS
The straw that broke the camel's back was when his credit card processor froze his processor and alot of money as well, and that is when the whole thing went bust.
There is between 15-18mm dollars owed to over 200 people just on credit cards alone. This doesn't include cash loans that he owes people.
These people live a very comfortable lifestyle, nice houses, expensive cards, own real estate etc.
Unfortunately there are many young kollel guys involved that don't have a single penny to their name and got connected to all this via the guys who brokered credit cards to this business.
At this point he hasn't given any sort of plan on how and when hes paying people back and is mostly just avoiding giving any real concrete plan. The options for all the victims all have downsides to them.
A few people have already disputed 100's of thousands of dollars, and this caused the merchant account to be flagged. Almost every person I know that is involved have gotten FR'ed by Amex.
People are either going to just have to default on the loans and hope for the best, or some may take the dispute route although with this much money at stake I doubt the processing bank will go down so easily. There are ways to dispute legally without saying any lies but it can be expensive and in addition there is a very big chance that this can blow up into an even larger criminal fraud investigation, and people might not want to be connected in any way shape or form to this business.
Its a big mess, and this isn't the only story happening right now - aside from Sterling there are at least 3 more stories that I know of going on right now.
I know it's been said many times here, and I myself always thought it won't happen to me, and its quite embarrassing - I'm a longtime ddfer and know many people on here personally - hence I created a new username for this post.
It's a very unfortunate situation with many victims involved. I know people who were/are on the verge of getting divorced bec of this. It's just not worth it. No matter how much point/money you can make. There are too many risks involved.
I will not answer any pm's and will try my best to answer any questions that are asked here.