Tweaker Fraud 101

Phil’s scams were good. But with my insight we were able to take it to a new level.  Most tweakers are involved in some type of fraud shit.  I think it’s a combination of the speed and mental hyperactivity that makes all tweakers think they can outsmart the consumer financial system.  Fake checks, printing checks, generating credit card numbers etc… But what drew my immediate attention in this situation was not only the well-executed IDs, it was the quality of his  “dumps.”  A dump is an excel spreadsheet with columns and rows of names, addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, dates of birth, emails  etc…  They come from all sorts of places and are a dime a dozen in the tweaker world.  When I met Phil they were taking the information from the dumps and trying to guess their way into their credit reports using one or two credit reporting sites.  It would take them a couple of hours to break into a report and after they did, they would hope that person happen to have an open line of credit they could hijack.  If they didn’t, they would start on the next name down the list for another hour or so until they accessed the full credit report showing all current and past lines of credit.

With my knowledge of credit reporting sites like creditkarma.com, creditsesame.com, annualcreditreport.com, etc… I was able to lower the access time from over an hour to less than ten minutes.  The thing about third party credit monitoring services is they give you a free copy of your credit report with minimal security questions.  On average, three.  As long as you have the social and date of birth and address, you can back into the security questions.  For example, if I go to creditsesame.com they would ask something like “What street did you live on in April of 2009?”  The options would go something like: A) Maple St.  B) Third St.  C) Smith Ln. and D) County Road 3151 FM 366…. In other words, three common fillers and then the actual street name.  Shit sometimes the answer would actually have all capital letters or the site would format one option noticeably different from the perfectly formatted canned options.  If you happen to get the question wrong and fail the security measures, you could hop over to the next credit provider… say creditkarma.com and get another shot with three fresh questions.  A majority of the times they would ask again what street you lived on and you would often see a familiar-named street from a previous site and know that one was the right answer.  With basic Google and social engineering strategies such as looking at your Facebook history locations, posts, and photo albums, you could almost always gain information necessary to bypass the security questions.  Lol, I remember this one time the question was what type of car was purchased with an auto loan in 2013 and the dude had a public Facebook photo album with a proud picture of his new Ford Platinum F150 from an album in 2013.  He titled it something obvious like “brand new Ford F-150 PLATINUM edition w/ EXTENDED CAB.”

Anyways, now that we had a process to get the credit reports quickly, the rest was a cake walk.  We searched for existing open lines of credit at department stores or any other organization that lends money to customers to purchase their items.  Best Buy was golden.  Macy’s, Dillard’s, Saks, Verizon, Kay’s Jewelers, Sears, Cabelas, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Discount Tire were also good…. we did them all.  See, even if you pay for credit monitoring services, those monitoring services never pick up on use of already-established lines of credit.  They are only meant to catch new credit account applications and inquiries.   So fuck trying to climb over the high security measures associated with opening new lines of credit, we instead took advantage of lax internal corporate security processes for major department and retail establishments.  Often looking for the young high school student looking bored as fuck at the register.  Maybe the desperate looking commissioned-based sales rep at Nordstrom that needs to boost their sales for the month.  Look for the “Gil” sales-type motherfucker from the Simpsons.  Ignore the short haired white “Karen,” stern-looking lady and ignore the people that look engaged in their roles.  Over time you learn to identify very quickly who actually would care about following proper protocol and who wouldn’t.

The process was to walk into the establishment with a fake ID and pretend we didn’t have our Best Buy credit card Or Sears Card on us.  We had lost our wallet or it was stolen on a crazy fishing trip out to the lake!  The general security process protocol for the department stores is to  verify your phone, address, and maybe input your social security number into the credit card terminal, and then check your ID.  Fuck when we didn’t have the plastic fake ID we were sometimes able to use a paper temporary ID and a fake credit card with the name on it as a secondary. Another common tool we had with us was a credit card embossed.  If we didn’t have that and we needed a secondary form of ID, we used Sams Club.  We had a business account at Sams that lets you change the joint account holder as many times as you wanted.  We would walk into Sams with a paper ID, say we were just added onto our work account and needed a Sams card, and they would take our picture and give us a Sams Card with the fake name and our picture on it.  With a paper ID we would say “yeah I lost my wallet, I have my temporary ID and my Sams card, will that work?”  7 times out of 10 it did.

Keep in mind that we also had the information from the dump.  We committed the social security number, address, phone number, and date of birth to memory before we walked in and tried this.  The combination of the fake or paper ID, Sams Club Card, and knowing all of the personal data was enough for us to gain access to the account.  They printed up a temporary shopping receipt that we could use to max out the line of credit.  Oh you have a $5,000 credit limit at Best Buy? Yeah we’ll get a MacBook Pro.  $2,500 at Dillard’s? Guess we are shopping clothes for us and random knickknacks.  Nordstrom was probably my favorite.  I walked into Nordstrom wearing scrubs I had bought from Goodwill and posed as a Doctor buying a gift for his wife.  I walked out with a $7,000 pair of diamond stud earrings without batting an eye.  I was super high and typically had been up for at least a couple of days.  My heart would race and walking out of the store with those studs is a unique fucked up feeling I will never forget.  

Of course the downside to this quick money is that we wanted cash quick for our shit and the markup that department stores place on their goods, especially jewelry, is ridiculous.  I may have walked out with $7,000 retail-priced diamonds, but our diamond buyer in the diamond district on Richmond Ave. would give us $2,200 cash for them.  THAT was frustrating.  We got so much Apple shit and diamonds that we had set consistent buyers for those two specific products.  We didn’t have to post on Offer Up, Facebook Marketplace, or Craigslist to sell those.  When we got Apple phones, iPads, or MacBooks, we went straight to our Indian buyer AJ off Hillcroft Ave., and the diamonds went to our diamond buyer, Chris on Richmond Ave.  We had tried selling our diamonds to Johnny Dang (the guys that does grills for rappers like Paul Wall,) as he was a couple of blocks away from Chris on Richmond, but Chris beat out Johnny by like $300 the first sale and so we never tried him again. If they were tools, random cell phones, designer clothes, or other non-Apple electronics, we had to post them for sale on Craigslist or trade straight to a dealer for shit if we needed it.  A very frustrating and time consuming process that neither of us enjoyed, but had to do.

While we made a ridiculous amount of retail purchases of shit on fraud, I had developed a BAD gambling problem and pissed away the cash as soon as I got it.  Phil wasn’t a gambler so he would keep my cash sometimes, but it would not be uncommon for us to hit a $5,000 lick and I show up the next day broke and him laughing and shaking his head at me.  I would often make a crack that we were the best dressed “broke” tweakers in Houston.  We would have $400 belts from Saks, designer eyeglasses, designer clothes, but would often find ourselves cash poor and desperate.  If we had the motivation to run the scams and not be high at the same time we could have easily become very rich.  But what fun is that? At that point it would be too close to  a real job in our fucked up addict minds.