ID Thieves Hijacking Accounts To Cash In On Bogus Warranties

You'd think it would be easy to bust criminals pulling scams like this. The warranty replacement has to be shipped to a physical address (house, apartment or P.C. box), why not start looking for the crooks there?

In a pre-online era, when we made most purchases in person, getting a warranty replacement on a broken product often required taking the defective item back to where you bought it. But now that we’re all buying things online, a number of retailers are willing to ship you a replacement on the understanding that you’ll immediately return the original item. ID thieves are taking advantage of this goodwill, hijacking customers’ accounts and convincing companies to send them free replacements for items they never bought.

From my experience, local law enforcement just doesn't really care because it's "petty property crime" and not worth their time. Until it becomes big, they will not waste their resources trying to catch the crooks...

I had my PayPal account compromised a few months back. The thieves used my account to buy 4 unlocked cell phones from eBay and had them shipped to an warehouse address in the next county. I managed to get PayPal involved and recovered the funds, but 2 of the phones had already shipped and were in route via USPS. I contacted the vendors, but they were unresponsive. I also called the local police station (in the same county). They wanted me to fill out a police report with my local police station and were generally disinterested in catching the thieves in the act. Anyways, I sent out a USPS intercept to stop the packages at the post office before they were delivered. Eventually, PayPal got a hold of the vendor and they had the packages returned to them from the post office. If I hadn't stopped the packages myself, the thieves would have received 2 Galaxy Notes that they could have offloaded on the international market for significantly more...

People have been doing this for a long time. The company I work for has been fighting people abusing the warranty return system for a while. I recall a guy getting arrested several years ago for being too greedy with Apple, after ripping them off for several early iPads.