Nina Kollars - Confessions of an Nespresso Money Mule - DEF CON 27 Conference
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it as an entertaining and informative explanation of the economics of reshipping and stolen-card resale scams.
What it is
At DEF CON 27, Nina Kollars tells how buying Nespresso capsules on eBay led her to investigate fraudsters reselling goods bought with stolen credit cards. She describes her non-technical tracking and reporting efforts.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2020 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends rozab · 2020-05 · on “G2A pays Factorio developer $40k over illegally obtained game keys”
Here's a tangentially related def con about the strange economics of that whole scam. Basically, everyone in the chain apart from the cardholder benefits. [this video]
Recommends Mountain_Skies · 2020-09 · on “The 'brushing' scam that's behind mystery parcels”
Nina Kollars had a nice related talk during Defcon on a similar scam buying what she thought was gray market Nespresso pods whose "seller" bought for her using a stolen credit card. They also gave her a free Nespresso machine, presumably to give her motive to keep quiet. [this video]
Recommends clutchdude · 2023-11 · on “Who's Behind the Swat USA Reshipping Service?”
In addition to the other commenters, here's an excellent defcon talk on what these some groups do: Nina Kollars - Confessions of an Nespresso Money Mule - DEF CON 27 Conference [this video] Essentially, they wait for a buyer of a product to come along to a listing and order it - they'll then buy it using stolen credentials, have it drop-shipped or reshipped to the end user. Everyone but the person with the original card comes out ahead, which is then pushed to all of us via higher fees if they notice and report the fraud.
Recommends h3xadecima1 · 2025-01 · on “I made $100K from a dick joke”
Nina Kollars gave an interesting talk on scammers selling coffee through eBay using stolen credit cards. Signature way of knowing is they're shipped direct from nespresso and the purchase price is 40-50% cheaper than retail. I ordered some keurig pods and experienced the same direct shipping and cheap prices. [this video]
Cites sgillen · 2020-04 · on “Jeff Bezos has returned to day-to-day management of Amazon”
You may be a money mule! And you may want to report this, someone vulnerable could be racking up massive debt paying for free stuff. see : [this video]
Cites numpad0 · 2022-05 · on “Tell HN: I was permanently banned from eBay in one hour”
ID could be faked or stolen credit cards can be used. In fact, dropshipping(ordering items on the fly, automatically, from a backend webstore - e.g. Amazon, Aliexpress, taobao) on stolen credit cards, or even pretending to do that without shipping part, is so prevalent there's a DEF CON talk[1] on that topic. 1: [this video]
Cites ValueAddedRS · 2022-12 · on “eBay, Etsy and Other Markets Now Have to Disclose Seller Details with Inform Act”
3P mule accounts have been a thing on eBay for years and eBay has been very much aware of it since at least 2015 when Brian Krebs wrote about it. [LINK] See also Confessions of a Nespresso Money Mule by Nina Kollars. [this video] In 2020, I personally reported 150+ hijacked eBay accounts used to commit $160k+ in triangulation fraud against a company I worked for at the time - eBay did very little to help. In February 2022, I collected about 80 reports from people who received 1099-Ks from eBay even though they had never knowingly created an account on the site - their PII (names, addresses, and in some cases even correct SSNs) were used to create fraudulent accounts that sold tens of thousands of