Im not op and I’m not sure they are using it for money laundering.
A money launderer can use a marketplace by creating a seller account and buying from himself. Since he’s the one buying he doesn’t need to deliver anything but he gets the money from a legit source. Usually he would use a payment method as close to money as possible so that it leaves less traces. But in OPs case, the amounts are low so he needs too many transactions to get something valuable. And because of the disputes, he’s (probably) not getting the money (?).
It could be card testing: the fraudster has a bunch of cards and doesn’t know which is valid or canceled. The best way to find out is to test in a real site. So he’ll test out each of them and the ones that go through are good to use elsewhere. The thing is that it would be better for him not to dispute the transactions so the OP would take much longer to find out about the scheme and shut it down. It’s better to use low amount transactions in this case so it doesn’t use too much of the credit available for him to defraud and probably doesn’t warn the card owner.
Another option is doing it just to hurt the OP marketplace. If you have too many disputes the brands can fine you and if you don’t solve the problem they can turn your account off. I’ve seen it happen when a competitor was trying to hurt the e-commerce. It’s a low move and rare but it happens.
One thing that might help is to analyze the sellers too. In a money laundering and even in the other settings, it could be part of the scheme. Are they new accounts? Are their volume exploding out of nowhere? Etc
> Since he’s the one buying he doesn’t need to deliver anything
This only works (in my mental model), when you produce the product you're selling in-house – like a digital product. But lots of "reselling" type businesses try to use this scheme as well. Like a restaurant might ring up more meals than they served, or less to not pay taxes. But, is this not easily spotted when the food import(?) cost doesn't match the revenue?
Maybe I just answered my own question, if the business is able to cook the books both ways, but it would also limit how much they're able to launder. Or is the import/export balance rarely/never checked?
That's why popular businesses for money laundering are car washes and nail salons. They're mostly cash based, and have very little in the way of inventory, so it's easy inflate your sales.
I'd think a video game arcade, especially one with laser tag, would be the best option.
Especially if you stick with quarters instead of using game cards like most modern arcades. Since quarters would be recycled anyways (Taken from the games and restocked into the quarter machine), it makes it easy to just deposit the cash you want to launder as if it had been fed into the quarter machine.
It's pretty easy to figure out max capacity of any of those businesses. Audit the traffic and compare against reported figures. So yeah, you can get away with it, but can't go overboard. It's safer to just waste some high margin inventory to keep. A bar I used to go to was a ML operation and they would just ring in lots of expensive drinks throughout the night and then the boss would come in and settle up the registers. No matter how much I drank my tab was always $20. The same was true for pretty much anyone that was a regular. It was great because it was definitely impressive to order a round of patrons shots for everyone at the bar. On a busy night there would be a couple instances where the DJ would bring up one of "the guys" and let him announce that the DJ was gonna play his 3 favorite songs and while they were playing everybody in the bars drinks would be on him. Very fun.
But a car wash uses water and a nail salon hires workers. Shouldn't take long to check that those numbers don't add up with what was sold at the end of a month.
Maybe. If you calim to wash a million cars but only wash a thousand that will be obvious, but 10 washes different is lost in the noise. Nail salons are easier because you can have the expensive personalized service that no real person buys but if someone investigates you will give it to them.
More likly the above are selling something illegal though. Pay for the expensive hand car wash but get drugs instead with a cheap automatic wash - nobody will know the difference.
For higher valued goods they use horses. A saddle can go for $30,000, so you buy some $1000 saddles and sell them for $30,000 and $29,000 worth of something else.
They will gladly send water down the drain if it threatens their enterprise. Besides, you have to be on the burner for huge crimes if law enforcement is going to care enough to audit water usage. Again, minor piece of circumstantial evidence in any case.