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Crime

Man Arrested for Scamming Amazon's Textbook Rental Service Out of $1.5 Million (theregister.com) 106

Posted by EditorDavid from the scamming-Amazon dept.
"A 36-year-old man from Portage, Michigan, was arrested on Thursday for allegedly renting thousands of textbooks from Amazon and selling them rather than returning them," reports the Register: From January 2016 through March 2021, according to the indictment, Talsma rented textbooks from the Amazon Rental program in order to sell them for a profit... His alleged fraud scheme involved using Amazon gift cards to rent the textbooks and prepaid MyVanilla Visa cards with minimal credit balances to cover the buyout price charged for books not returned. "These gift cards and MyVanilla Visa cards did not contain names or other means of identifying him as the person renting the textbooks," the indictment says. "Geoffrey Mark Talsma made sure that the MyVanilla Visa cards did not have sufficient credit balances, or any balance at all, when the textbook rentals were past due so that Amazon could not collect the book buyout price from those cards."

As the scheme progressed, the indictment says, Talsma "recruited individuals, including defendants Gregory Mark Gleesing, Lovedeep Singh Dhanoa, and Paul Steven Larson, and other individuals known to the grand jury, to allow him to use their names and mailing addresses to further continue receiving rental textbooks in amounts well above the fifteen-book limit..."

The indictment says the four alleged scammers stole 14,000 textbooks worth over $1.5m.
The U.S. Department of Justice adds If convicted, Talsma faces a maximum term of imprisonment of 20 years for each of the mail and wire fraud offenses; a maximum term of imprisonment of 10 years for interstate transportation of stolen property; and a maximum term of imprisonment of 5 years for making false statements to the FBI.

Additionally, if convicted of the aggravated identity theft charges, Talsma will serve a maximum term of imprisonment of four years consecutive to any sentence imposed for the other criminal offenses. Restitution and forfeiture of certain assets obtained with the proceeds of the scheme may also be ordered as a result of a conviction.
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Man Arrested for Scamming Amazon's Textbook Rental Service Out of $1.5 Million More

Man Arrested for Scamming Amazon's Textbook Rental Service Out of $1.5 Million

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  • Probably a C student (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Registered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) on Sunday October 17, 2021 @07:52AM (#61899973)
    He clearly was no too bright if he didn't think Amazon would catch on and be able to find him. They might ignore a few unpaid rental buys but 10,000? From the same geographic area? They had addresses, prepaid car numbers, etc., all of which could be used to narrow done the list of suspects. One visit by the FBI to one of the persons he later recruited to the scheme and he is screwed. Even if the prepaid cards don't have a name associated with them, unless he is buying them all over the state, a visit to a store where a lot were bought is likely to reveal who might be behind the scheme.

    • He clearly was no too bright if he didn't think Amazon would catch on and be able to find him. They might ignore a few unpaid rental buys but 10,000? From the same geographic area? They had addresses, prepaid car numbers, etc., all of which could be used to narrow done the list of suspects. One visit by the FBI to one of the persons he later recruited to the scheme and he is screwed. Even if the prepaid cards don't have a name associated with them, unless he is buying them all over the state, a visit to a store where a lot were bought is likely to reveal who might be behind the scheme.

      Crooks usually aren't very smart. They are rarely super geniuses like in TV shows and movies.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      He clearly didn't think it through to the end, or he would have bought some "get rich doing this one simple thing on the Internet" ads from Google and recruited a network of patsies to insulate him from the consequences.

    • He CDC was plenty smart, he exploited Amazon's system to his (criminal) advantage, his failure was to not know when to stop. He rented, sold, then shipped 14K books, he wasn't lazy, and his trick worked 14K times, obviously he found a failure in the system, so not dumb.

      • He CDC was plenty smart, he exploited Amazon's system to his (criminal) advantage, his failure was to not know when to stop. He rented, sold, then shipped 14K books, he wasn't lazy, and his trick worked 14K times, obviously he found a failure in the system, so not dumb.

        He may have been smart enough to see a weak point, but stupid enough to think he could get away with exploiting it. Amazon could have stopped such scams by pre-authorizing an amount equal to the purchase price to verify funds available at that time, but then many who used their rental service would be without funds until the hold was lifted by their bank.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DarkOx ( 621550 )

          Amazon could have stopped such scams by pre-authorizing an amount equal to the purchase price to verify funds available at that time, but then many who used their rental service would be without funds until the hold was lifted by their bank.

          I thought if you did your own payment processing - ie not outsourcing to square or something - you could query if the card was a pre-paid/gift card. Its been a long while since I was that deep into it but I thought that was the case. Amazon clearly could have made the process for recovering funds in the event the book isn't returned more robust at the expense of making the process more onerous and limiting the options of renters. I also doubt nobody considered some version of this scheme at Amazon before th

      • LOL, ripping off people (or companies) is easy...getting away with it, not so much.

        So yeah, he was smart enough to find a way to steal, but not smart enough to realize that he wasn't smart enough to get away with it. It's like an advanced form of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

        • After a lifetime of watching corporations get slap-on-the-wrist fines for their malfeasance, perhaps he thought that would be his punishment too?

          When companies are found to have over-charged millions of customers, the customers get a coupon, and nobody goes to jail. And even that comes about via a civil suit, not a criminal one. When was the last time you saw a corporate exec get criminally charged for completely willful behavior?

          It is a felony for you to lie to a bank. It is no crime whatsoever for them

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by DarkOx ( 621550 )

            It is a felony for you to lie to a bank. It is no crime whatsoever for them to lie to you.
            It is a felony for you to lie to a insurance company . It is no crime whatsoever for them to lie to you.
            It is a felony for you to lie to a credit reporting agency. It is no crime whatsoever for them to lie to you.

            That is not altogether true. If they make materially false statements to you, with the intent of causing you to act against your own interests; that would still be fraud. Its still a crime.

            I will agree that the law is lopsided and unfair in this regard as there are laws specific to falsification of bank and insurance records by the client that lower the standards of the crime, like you don't have to prove harm etc. However its simply not true that its 'no crime whatsoever' if they lie to you. If the maker m

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Sadly this is true. When I worked at home Depot we had cashiers getting arrested about once or twice a year for thinking that because it was easy to pocket the money from transactions it would be easy to get away with it...

      • I classify this kind of ingenuity as cleverness rather than smartness. I think most people would agree it isn't wisdom. If he were clever AND smart, he would have known when to stop. If he were also wise, he would have known that there are far better ways to make money, and that doing so honestly offers the least risk and greatest benefits over the long term.
    • Heh, give him some credit. The basic mechanics of the scheme weren't that unintelligent. But like most schemes, it falls apart when scaling. That's where his stupidity does show forth in spectacular style. Once you have to recruit other people, it's only a matter of time before someone turns on you. Also, it becomes too expensive to cover one's tracks (as you said, it's hard to buy the cards in different places every time), and everything you do has the potential to leave more evidence. But few criminals ca

      • Heh, give him some credit.

        I did, hence the "C" grade.

        Once you have to recruit other people, it's only a matter of time before someone turns on you.

        Thats the key - squeeze a low level person to catch the leader.

    • No, he knew they would catch on. That is why he took the countermeasures he took. He might have gotten away with it if he hadn't gotten complacent and greedy.

      • No, he knew they would catch on. That is why he took the countermeasures he took. He might have gotten away with it if he hadn't gotten complacent and greedy.

        Right. It's the "and not find him part" of his logic that shows he was not too bright in the end.

  • The real scam is the cost of textbooks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Abe677 ( 3874115 ) on Sunday October 17, 2021 @08:23AM (#61900039)
    The real scam is the cost of textbooks. Publishers collude with schools or instructors to refresh texts to make last years text obsolete. Those old texts could be re-used year after year until the books were worn out or broken.

    • The real scam is the cost of textbooks.

      Fortunately there's an answer. [umn.edu]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by wwphx ( 225607 )
        I work at a university library and I hope to post this on our web page. Our web site infrastructure is being overhauled at the moment, so we'll see what happens.

    • You have an illegal scam cheating a legal racket. I can't get worked up at thieves stealing from thieves.

      Books today are so much more wildly expensive than they were for my undergrad. Well beyond any inflation adjustment. Current higher education finance is a racket. The flow of money is from government to university via the student. The student is put on the hook for paying that money back so then the flow is from student to government.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by wwphx ( 225607 )
        My worst case of being defrauded by the school was when I went to buy an algebra textbook and couldn't find it used anywhere for a reasonable price, ended up having to pay the extortionist price through the school bookstore. Turned out that the school had written a ten page insert of problems, which made it a custom edition specific to our university.

        Rat bastards.

  • Parentheticaly .... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Sunday October 17, 2021 @08:29AM (#61900049) Journal

    ... this scheme wouldn't have been worth it (or possible; who would rent normal books??) if textbooks were not so insanely expensive.

    He made a racket out of ... a racket.

    • ... this scheme wouldn't have been worth it (or possible; who would rent normal books??)

      People who use a library? Though, yea textbooks are a scam.

  • What a low life.

  • The 'Amazon' part is what makes it apparently news for nerds, even if it doesn't matter.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Strider- ( 39683 )

      At least my library, for books which have a high replacement cost, makes you sign a contract/waiver when you borrow one of these books. I needed to borrow a copy of the Canadian Electrical Code, and the replacement cost on that book was something like $300. Before they'd let me take it out, they made me sign a notice that I was responsible for that if it were to be not returned.

  • Was it? When the books crossed the state line, weren't they simply rented at that point?

    Like you know, the man could have repeatedly thought "Okay. THIS TIME... I'm REALLY renting. ONLY renting." and then after a few days "Aaw, who am I kiddind? I'm so keeping this shit..."

  • That dude wouldn't even need to change his name if he worked in the Adult industry instead :)

  • His alleged fraud scheme involved using Amazon gift cards to rent the textbooks and prepaid MyVanilla Visa cards with minimal credit balances to cover the buyout price charged for books not returned. [...] Geoffrey Mark Talsma made sure that the MyVanilla Visa cards did not have sufficient credit balances, or any balance at all, when the textbook rentals were past due so that Amazon could not collect the book buyout price from those cards."

    1. He used Amazon gift cards to rent the textbooks

    2. He used prepaid

    • Re: Who wrote this? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kenh ( 9056 ) on Sunday October 17, 2021 @10:44AM (#61900367) Homepage Journal

      He rented multiple textbooks all backed by the same $150 myvanilla credit card to cover every one of his rented text books. At rental, there were sufficient funds, but when all dozen books backed by the same card didn't come back, Amazon could only get $150, not the $1,200 it was owed for a dozen books.

      • Ah, that's the part that was missing from the summary.
        Thank you, it makes much more sense now.

        Conclusion: Anonymous pre-paid credit cards allow people to act illegally, so they should be outlawed! /sarcasm

  • Sentence seems overkill (Score:4, Insightful)

    by phaelax ( 830000 ) on Sunday October 17, 2021 @10:50AM (#61900381)
    He basically faces life in prison for stealing text books? Seriously?

    • Everything seems trivial when you reduce it to simple words. The guy got Life imprisonment because some guy stood in the way of an axe? The guy got Life imprisonment for driving through a school zone on the way from a pub while people were on the road?

      Rather than saying stealing textbooks use terms like write fraud amounting to theft in excess of a million dollars.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by truedfx ( 802492 )
        Since you want to compare this to murder: he faces up to more than twice the average for murder (15 years; source: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pu... [ojp.gov]).

        • I'm not comparing his punishment to murder. I'm comparing your language to murder.

          He's facing penalties related to wirefraud. Those penalties are defined and consistent with other penalties for similar amounts and similar cases. You seem to just be confused because you can't get over the fact that this involved stealing textbooks.

    • Yes.

      Just like he'd face imprisonment for any other large-scale fraud.

      The fact that it was textbooks is irrelevant; it's the fraud that he's being prosecuted for.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tragedy ( 27079 )

        Just like he'd face imprisonment for any other large-scale fraud.

        Unless he ran a large financial company and they were selling securities that they claimed to be backed by assets that turned out to be fake. Or a large telecom and knowingly fraudulently billed millions of people for services they did not use. Or a financial services company (not sure how else to describe Western Union, so I'll just use their name) and you knowingly aid and abet wire fraud. Or you're an aircraft manufacturer and you bribe people left and right. Or a car manufacturer and you intentionally h

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • 24 years is a different number of years than you'll serve on a live sentence.

      Didn't learn to count, did you?

      • It is 25 years per count. There are 14,000 counts, because he ran the scam that many times.

        • Federal sentencing guidelines do not call for consecutive sentences. The sentences all run at the same time.

          The reason it is 24 years instead of 20 years is that the four years is added onto the rest of the sentence, by statute. The rest of the charges are by sentencing guidelines. 24 years is the maximum sentence. It will likely be less.

          • So I guess you should let the DOJ know what you found.

            If convicted, Talsma faces a maximum term of imprisonment of 20 years for each of the mail and wire fraud offenses; a maximum term of imprisonment of 10 years for interstate transportation of stolen property; and a maximum term of imprisonment of 5 years for making false statements to the FBI. Additionally, if convicted of the aggravated identity theft charges, Talsma will serve a maximum term of imprisonment of four years consecutive to any sentence imposed for the other criminal offenses. Restitution and forfeiture of certain assets obtained with the proceeds of the scheme may also be ordered as a result of a conviction.

            Though I guess that would be 20(*20?)*14000+10+5+4
            It does say the four years are consecutive, but it is to whatever the rest of the sentence is, which according to the DOJ is a considerable longer period than 20 years. Not to say that the sentence won't drop before all this is over, no one gets charged with anything like that kind of time. I mean heck, the DOJ said they had Hillary on 1000+ counts of revealing classified information, and that wasn't ev

            • That should have been 20(+20?) instead of 20(*20?), I am unsure if they are meaning that mail and wire fraud are separate charges, or a single charge.

  • don't like getting ripped off? (Score:3)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Sunday October 17, 2021 @11:37AM (#61900475) Homepage Journal

    Then don't accept anonymous "credit cards". The point of credit is that a person is operating in good faith with their own identity to back it up. If you eliminate the identity part of things and just pretend that an anonymous account with a balance is the same thing as credit ... well I don't have much sympathy for Amazon for not figuring out how this is a problem. They should probably sue Visa, they're the real scam artists here.

  • The placement of the word "for" in the subject makes no sense. It's like he was an employee of the Amazon Textbook rental service and they paid him to scam for them, and now he's getting arrested.

    The real issue here is that he used burner credit cards with zero balance on them so that he was never charged for the books that he flat out stole and resold.

  • Just finished Sunday newspaper routine. Read from a Kindle (but could have used phone/ laptop/ pi etc). I was staggered by what a racket college athletics was as I scrolled past dozens of pages of college sportsball news. And now can't help wondering how these two different parasitic aspects of college education became the tails wagging the dog. If content change in a document warrants killing trees and accumulating student debt, perhaps ebooks could be an alternative. Last few certs I studied for were

  • "Talsma faces a maximum term of imprisonment of 20 years for each of the mail and wire fraud offenses"

    If convicted on each charge, this guy will be in prison until the Sun burns out.

  • And he might be facing less time.

  • Let us say that Amazon defrauded you out money, what do you think would happen if you went to the police?

    Iâ(TM)ll tell you â¦.

    They will say it is a civil matter and that you are free to file a lawsuit at your own expense. Of course, you cannot even do that as Amazon wrote themselves out of the law in their TOS.

    When we the last time a corporate CEO went to jail for knowingly over-charging tens of millions of customers?

  • My dad lost a lot of money via a gift-card scam (not Amazon). Those things are poorly regulated.

  • So.... he stole 6 textbooks?

  • expensive books (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Accused of stealing $1,500,000 with 14,000 books = $107.14 per (used) book.
    They must be really good books.

    • You have not priced textbooks lately. The textbook industry is a rent racket. There are institution specific editions that cannot be used elsewhere, required online materials for additional fees, and edition changes that swap out enough homework problems to thwart the used book market. Uni bookstore buyback might be at 50% of new price, then mark back up by 40-60% before resale.

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