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Belarusian Valery Petrov left to live in the United States four years ago. Having sent a parcel with skates to his homeland, he realized that sending goods from America to the CIS can make a good business. Now Valery is the founder of one of the major delivery services, and the main problem of such intermediary companies is carders, scammers who pay for purchases with other people's credit cards. Neither the CIA, nor the Russian K department, nor Valery himself can cope with them. Interview Digital.Report with the service manager Pochtoy.com.
DR: How did your business start?
Valery Petrov: I went to America on a green-card, where I spent a lot of time on forums due to the specifics of my work. At that time, there were few such services, in my opinion, only the English-language Shapito functioned with some kind of sophisticated tariff system. And once I came across a topic where a guy was looking for a person who could send him skates. I sent packages home, was familiar with the work of the post office, not as much as now, of course, but in general understood how it works. By that time, I already knew how the post office works in America. So I pro-monitored the rates, wrote to this guy, and offered to help for a 10% commission. I remember sending him some photos, telling him that I wasn't a fraud, and that I was really in the States. He transferred the money, I sent the skates, went through the first order and everything started to spin.
I posted ads and started learning on the e-bay forums. I opened the topic and started accepting orders via Skype, ICQ, and email. Over time, the business began to grow, the authorities began to pay attention to the parcels, when there were 30-40 of them and I began to clog up the working back room with them. As a result, I was engaged in customer support, repackaged packages, and then, since I didn't have a car at the time, carried them to the bus stop. Often there were so many of them that I couldn't carry them all at once. A bus would arrive, I would load boxes on it, and the drivers who knew me would start laughing. They said: "You will soon send the whole of America somewhere, stop."
I started looking for people who can make me a website. I found some guys who agreed, and that was the beginning of the business. Later, they rented a warehouse, because they were tired of using one of the rooms in the apartment as such. Then I had to buy a truck, equipment for the warehouse-the same scanners. Then I hired one person, then another, and so on. If we talk about pochtoy.com As for the startup – I paid about $10 thousand for the first version of the site, and I also bought a computer and printer, and all this paid off quite quickly.
DR: There were no problems with the legislation in the states?
Valery Petrov: I immediately registered the company, where all this is done very quickly and via the Internet. This, by the way, interested me in the first place. In America, there are problems with taxes, if you do not pay them – it can come back to haunt. So I immediately wanted everything to be official, so that even if someone comes, I'm not afraid of anyone. And it's easier that way.
DR: Are there many analogues of this service now?
Valery Petrov: Relatively not. Less than it was at the time I was talking about. Then intermediaries like me surfaced, they were doing this as a part-time job. And then the market started to form, and people started investing in it. About 5 large companies have appeared, and about 4-5 of those that are well-known are constantly offering something, introducing new deliveries, optimizing tariffs, and so on. In short, there are about 10 successful companies now.
DR: Why do you only work with CIS countries?
Valery Petrov: It may not make sense to go out to the whole world, because for Russia, for example, the offer is convenient for the country's limit-1000 euros. In European countries, the limits are 10, 15, or 50 euros, depending on the country. Another problem is added: for example, parcels are often stolen in Italy.
It turns out, on the one hand, it sounds nice to enter the global market. On the other hand, many of our competitors work only with the CIS, because Russia is larger than the whole of Europe and its solvency is high.
There is another reason: a person lives in some Kostroma, he has money, but there is nowhere to spend it. We have people from Chelyabinsk who ordered hockey uniforms. So if you approach it well, then Russia is through the roof. There is also Kazakhstan, which is also often ordered, and Belarus and Ukraine in the appendage.
DR: Have you encountered a problem with carders?
Valery Petrov: Yes, there is a common problem among intermediaries when malefactors who own someone else's credit card data use it to pay for their orders. There are many of them, and they are constantly changing. They do not risk anything at all, are not afraid of the police, and are not afraid for other people's money.
They can forge any documents, draw any passport or credit card. They have forums that provide various services, including people who speak excellent English and can call any store. Moreover, they even have courses! Recently, on one forum, I came across a suggestion: for $1300, any person is taken to the" club " and taught to card, everything is laid out on the shelves. Or they have a "garant" service. One carder steals something, he is a fraudster. The second fraudster outbid the product from him. And the owner of the site where all this happens, monitors the transfer of money and acts as a guarantor, also earning it.
This is a kind of business, a separate part of the market that lives on its own. There are people who really want to make money on this, and this provokes carnage – they finish each other off until they turn blue (DoS hacker attack on a computer system in order to bring it to failure-editor's note). Sometimes you open one resource and it doesn't work, and then you realize that people are sharing money. They have an interesting relationship.
DR: Are there any methods of struggle?
Valery Petrov: This is a unique situation in general: now it is very easy to find and buy a database with credit accounts, including PayPal. The point is precisely in impunity. People are sitting in Russia, where no one is doing this at all. Any schoolchild can save money in the store for small things.
The problem of carding for us personally is the police. If scammers skardil some product, and the store makes a file report, or the cardholder goes to the bank to write a statement, the police officer, of course, comes to the intermediary, wanting to understand whether he is involved in this scheme. In addition to the fact that we have been visited by the police, inspectors, and the FBI, we also lose money.
At some point, we realized that we should not turn a blind eye to this. They started catching carders, coming up with various tools to catch them, and analyzing their behavior. I can say that we are probably one of the most experienced in this field right now, and we have a lot of tools to catch them. We have the most unfavorable environment for them. I won't say what tools they use, but they monitor these methods.
DR: Taking revenge?
Valery Petrov: Of course. Imagine someone buying a product and calculating in their head that the ordered laptop will successfully sell and earn $ 2,000. But in the end, we catch it and send the goods back.
In November, we had problems: such offended carders heavily finished the site for four months. Several times it was so felled that it was necessary to connect programmers. We built the protection, so it didn't affect us much, but it was still unpleasant. Some mail is spammed so that you open gmail, and there are a thousand emails coming in a minute. Or the phone was interrupted through some program. He kept calling, and no one could get in touch with us. All this is not difficult to work around, but it is still a problem. I even had to change the names in all social networks. Offended gentlemen also begin to pester them there.
Especially the impudent ones offer to enter the share. We catch a carder, he realizes that he has been caught, and gives out: "Guys, let's close your eyes, and I will pay you a hundred dollars from the parcel. We can send you at least 50 parcels, you will earn good money" It is clear that this is a dead end. They don't risk anything, and we risk everything.
DR: Have the States tried to solve these issues with the help of the police?
Valery Petrov: Yes, everyone doesn't care. What can they do? We caught several people, even knew the address to which the package was sent, which, by the way, was still on the way. We made a file report, contacted the police, and to no avail. What can the US police do against a small carder from Russia? Such stories come up only when they take some hacker who broke into the bank. And a schoolboy who stole something worth $ 500 or even $ 1,000 doesn't interest anyone.
We have a colleague who was contacted by the CIA on this issue. A seemingly prepared person then began to explain to her who carders are and how to catch them. When we talked to her, we came to the conclusion that I know more than a CIA specialist. We face this every day, but here it was the impression that he had read the brochure somewhere and came to tell us how to live.
Now there are also prosharennye stores that have already experienced this and do not want to lose money. They simply stop sending intermediaries to those companies where they noticed cases of carding. The addresses of intermediaries are banned and not sent there. Apple, for example, is almost immediately blacklisted.
DR: Which countries have more carders?
Valery Petrov: Most of them come from Russia, Ukraine is in second place. In Russia, at least it is clear: if you buy a laptop for $ 800, you can at least send it to yourself. And in Ukraine, there seems to be a limit of 150 euros, and even this does not stop them. They also make it so that you don't have to pay the tax. They don't give up, in general.
It is noteworthy that according to my personal observations, people under 25 years of age do this in Russia. But in Ukraine, you can often meet a carder at the age of about 35. I'm talking to a man on the phone one day, and I hear that there's a man on the other end of the line who's old enough to be my father. I ask him 3-4 questions, I understand that he is a carder, and he understands that I understand. I even like to ask around: Are you not ashamed at all? When you were at school, did you dream of stealing gloves?
DR: The Russian police can't help either?
Valery Petrov: I wrote to the Department " K " (a division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs that deals with crimes in the field of information technology — editor's note) in Moscow and in Russia – nothing.
I'll even tell you a story: we had a carder from Belarus. It would seem that a person will not joke with the police there. I contacted the head of the K department for Belarus. He was interested, I gave him two hundred percent carders, and he gave me the phone number of the deputy. He, by the way, turned out to be a knowledgeable person, and summed up: "We will pull them, you can come and warn them, they say, again and there will be problems, but if you do everything officially, you need to go to the embassy, collect a bunch of documents, send them back through the embassy, make requests and then follow the list."
When he asked me what they'd done, and I said" sneakers, " he laughed and said there was no point. It turns out that with this trouble we are 1 on 1.
DR: And there can be no information leakage through your resource?
Valery Petrov: No, we don't store any credit card data, everything happens through payment systems. When a person enters their wallet on the site, they are transferred to a payment card, for example, PayPal. They have a bunch of security departments there, and why would we do that?
If we talk about the market, we can now observe a tendency to reduce the cost of delivery.
It's a shame that our work is only inside the warehouse, and customers understand that we have nothing to do with delivery problems, but they still come to us with questions, to whom else? Carders, of course, are improving, but we are improving with them.
DR: How did your business start?
Valery Petrov: I went to America on a green-card, where I spent a lot of time on forums due to the specifics of my work. At that time, there were few such services, in my opinion, only the English-language Shapito functioned with some kind of sophisticated tariff system. And once I came across a topic where a guy was looking for a person who could send him skates. I sent packages home, was familiar with the work of the post office, not as much as now, of course, but in general understood how it works. By that time, I already knew how the post office works in America. So I pro-monitored the rates, wrote to this guy, and offered to help for a 10% commission. I remember sending him some photos, telling him that I wasn't a fraud, and that I was really in the States. He transferred the money, I sent the skates, went through the first order and everything started to spin.
I posted ads and started learning on the e-bay forums. I opened the topic and started accepting orders via Skype, ICQ, and email. Over time, the business began to grow, the authorities began to pay attention to the parcels, when there were 30-40 of them and I began to clog up the working back room with them. As a result, I was engaged in customer support, repackaged packages, and then, since I didn't have a car at the time, carried them to the bus stop. Often there were so many of them that I couldn't carry them all at once. A bus would arrive, I would load boxes on it, and the drivers who knew me would start laughing. They said: "You will soon send the whole of America somewhere, stop."
I started looking for people who can make me a website. I found some guys who agreed, and that was the beginning of the business. Later, they rented a warehouse, because they were tired of using one of the rooms in the apartment as such. Then I had to buy a truck, equipment for the warehouse-the same scanners. Then I hired one person, then another, and so on. If we talk about pochtoy.com As for the startup – I paid about $10 thousand for the first version of the site, and I also bought a computer and printer, and all this paid off quite quickly.
DR: There were no problems with the legislation in the states?
Valery Petrov: I immediately registered the company, where all this is done very quickly and via the Internet. This, by the way, interested me in the first place. In America, there are problems with taxes, if you do not pay them – it can come back to haunt. So I immediately wanted everything to be official, so that even if someone comes, I'm not afraid of anyone. And it's easier that way.
DR: Are there many analogues of this service now?
Valery Petrov: Relatively not. Less than it was at the time I was talking about. Then intermediaries like me surfaced, they were doing this as a part-time job. And then the market started to form, and people started investing in it. About 5 large companies have appeared, and about 4-5 of those that are well-known are constantly offering something, introducing new deliveries, optimizing tariffs, and so on. In short, there are about 10 successful companies now.
DR: Why do you only work with CIS countries?
Valery Petrov: It may not make sense to go out to the whole world, because for Russia, for example, the offer is convenient for the country's limit-1000 euros. In European countries, the limits are 10, 15, or 50 euros, depending on the country. Another problem is added: for example, parcels are often stolen in Italy.
It turns out, on the one hand, it sounds nice to enter the global market. On the other hand, many of our competitors work only with the CIS, because Russia is larger than the whole of Europe and its solvency is high.
There is another reason: a person lives in some Kostroma, he has money, but there is nowhere to spend it. We have people from Chelyabinsk who ordered hockey uniforms. So if you approach it well, then Russia is through the roof. There is also Kazakhstan, which is also often ordered, and Belarus and Ukraine in the appendage.
DR: Have you encountered a problem with carders?
Valery Petrov: Yes, there is a common problem among intermediaries when malefactors who own someone else's credit card data use it to pay for their orders. There are many of them, and they are constantly changing. They do not risk anything at all, are not afraid of the police, and are not afraid for other people's money.
They can forge any documents, draw any passport or credit card. They have forums that provide various services, including people who speak excellent English and can call any store. Moreover, they even have courses! Recently, on one forum, I came across a suggestion: for $1300, any person is taken to the" club " and taught to card, everything is laid out on the shelves. Or they have a "garant" service. One carder steals something, he is a fraudster. The second fraudster outbid the product from him. And the owner of the site where all this happens, monitors the transfer of money and acts as a guarantor, also earning it.
This is a kind of business, a separate part of the market that lives on its own. There are people who really want to make money on this, and this provokes carnage – they finish each other off until they turn blue (DoS hacker attack on a computer system in order to bring it to failure-editor's note). Sometimes you open one resource and it doesn't work, and then you realize that people are sharing money. They have an interesting relationship.
DR: Are there any methods of struggle?
Valery Petrov: This is a unique situation in general: now it is very easy to find and buy a database with credit accounts, including PayPal. The point is precisely in impunity. People are sitting in Russia, where no one is doing this at all. Any schoolchild can save money in the store for small things.
The problem of carding for us personally is the police. If scammers skardil some product, and the store makes a file report, or the cardholder goes to the bank to write a statement, the police officer, of course, comes to the intermediary, wanting to understand whether he is involved in this scheme. In addition to the fact that we have been visited by the police, inspectors, and the FBI, we also lose money.
At some point, we realized that we should not turn a blind eye to this. They started catching carders, coming up with various tools to catch them, and analyzing their behavior. I can say that we are probably one of the most experienced in this field right now, and we have a lot of tools to catch them. We have the most unfavorable environment for them. I won't say what tools they use, but they monitor these methods.
DR: Taking revenge?
Valery Petrov: Of course. Imagine someone buying a product and calculating in their head that the ordered laptop will successfully sell and earn $ 2,000. But in the end, we catch it and send the goods back.
In November, we had problems: such offended carders heavily finished the site for four months. Several times it was so felled that it was necessary to connect programmers. We built the protection, so it didn't affect us much, but it was still unpleasant. Some mail is spammed so that you open gmail, and there are a thousand emails coming in a minute. Or the phone was interrupted through some program. He kept calling, and no one could get in touch with us. All this is not difficult to work around, but it is still a problem. I even had to change the names in all social networks. Offended gentlemen also begin to pester them there.
Especially the impudent ones offer to enter the share. We catch a carder, he realizes that he has been caught, and gives out: "Guys, let's close your eyes, and I will pay you a hundred dollars from the parcel. We can send you at least 50 parcels, you will earn good money" It is clear that this is a dead end. They don't risk anything, and we risk everything.
DR: Have the States tried to solve these issues with the help of the police?
Valery Petrov: Yes, everyone doesn't care. What can they do? We caught several people, even knew the address to which the package was sent, which, by the way, was still on the way. We made a file report, contacted the police, and to no avail. What can the US police do against a small carder from Russia? Such stories come up only when they take some hacker who broke into the bank. And a schoolboy who stole something worth $ 500 or even $ 1,000 doesn't interest anyone.
We have a colleague who was contacted by the CIA on this issue. A seemingly prepared person then began to explain to her who carders are and how to catch them. When we talked to her, we came to the conclusion that I know more than a CIA specialist. We face this every day, but here it was the impression that he had read the brochure somewhere and came to tell us how to live.
Now there are also prosharennye stores that have already experienced this and do not want to lose money. They simply stop sending intermediaries to those companies where they noticed cases of carding. The addresses of intermediaries are banned and not sent there. Apple, for example, is almost immediately blacklisted.
DR: Which countries have more carders?
Valery Petrov: Most of them come from Russia, Ukraine is in second place. In Russia, at least it is clear: if you buy a laptop for $ 800, you can at least send it to yourself. And in Ukraine, there seems to be a limit of 150 euros, and even this does not stop them. They also make it so that you don't have to pay the tax. They don't give up, in general.
It is noteworthy that according to my personal observations, people under 25 years of age do this in Russia. But in Ukraine, you can often meet a carder at the age of about 35. I'm talking to a man on the phone one day, and I hear that there's a man on the other end of the line who's old enough to be my father. I ask him 3-4 questions, I understand that he is a carder, and he understands that I understand. I even like to ask around: Are you not ashamed at all? When you were at school, did you dream of stealing gloves?
DR: The Russian police can't help either?
Valery Petrov: I wrote to the Department " K " (a division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs that deals with crimes in the field of information technology — editor's note) in Moscow and in Russia – nothing.
I'll even tell you a story: we had a carder from Belarus. It would seem that a person will not joke with the police there. I contacted the head of the K department for Belarus. He was interested, I gave him two hundred percent carders, and he gave me the phone number of the deputy. He, by the way, turned out to be a knowledgeable person, and summed up: "We will pull them, you can come and warn them, they say, again and there will be problems, but if you do everything officially, you need to go to the embassy, collect a bunch of documents, send them back through the embassy, make requests and then follow the list."
When he asked me what they'd done, and I said" sneakers, " he laughed and said there was no point. It turns out that with this trouble we are 1 on 1.
DR: And there can be no information leakage through your resource?
Valery Petrov: No, we don't store any credit card data, everything happens through payment systems. When a person enters their wallet on the site, they are transferred to a payment card, for example, PayPal. They have a bunch of security departments there, and why would we do that?
If we talk about the market, we can now observe a tendency to reduce the cost of delivery.
It's a shame that our work is only inside the warehouse, and customers understand that we have nothing to do with delivery problems, but they still come to us with questions, to whom else? Carders, of course, are improving, but we are improving with them.
