Yes, we were scammed last year by the Triangulation Fraud. Several orders for one popular product came to our online website over a period of 3 months. Shipped most of them. Started getting charge backs. Immediately held future orders for that item until we figured out what was going on.
Was able to trace the billing address and lookup some of the owners of the stolen credit card. We noticed that some billing addresses were incomplete--just enough to get it to pass credit card checks, mostly leaving out apartment numbers and putting a bogus customer name (Online Credit card sales do not check customer name). Since the shipping address was the only intimidate information on the order, we were able to track down some of the phone numbers where the goods were shipped using SPOKEO services. With the help of those customers who received the stolen goods, we were able to trace the fraud back to eBay and saw the fraudulent sales on eBay for that item at a price "too good to be true".
So what happened to the stuff we shipped that got charged back? We let them keep it. It was not their fault they got trapped in this eBay triangulation scam. The item was oversized so it would have been very costly to issue call tags to get the items returned to us, and we are sure some would NOT cooperate to the point that they would return the items to us. It was not worth it. Let them keep it. They were very helpful tracing down those orders back to eBay sellers who were operating this fraud. There were still some shipments in transit, and we were able to turn them around by contacting FedEx.
We got the eBay ids involved in the scam thanks to the help of the customers. The eBay contact info was completely fraudulent. We also noticed that the IP addresses of the online orders were mostly from other countries to so there would be now way to send the police and throw them in jail. We blocked those IP addresses from our website. Also noticed they made a few legitimate eBay sales on very small items to build up a little bit of positive feedback and a little bit of eBay history before launching the fraud. Very shrewd.
We reported those eBay accounts to eBay fraud. Tried to get more info about those sellers to report them to the FBI, but eBay said the user ID info is protected by law and eBay could not cooperate with filing an FBI report !!! So those people are still on eBay doing fraud. eBay closed one of the accounts and I saw a new account pop up somewhere else months later with that same item for sale at a price "too good to be true". The fraudsters no longer order from our website now that we are on to them, but I am sure they are scamming somebody's website right now with stolen credit cards.
