Scamerican dream
Chapter 12. Selling the air (2001)
‘Nick, just keep it to the point, without examples and roundabout explanations for half an hour.’
‘You’re the one who always starts stories from the times of Noah. Also, I came up with it, so I’ll tell it the way I want to tell it!’ said Nick, getting pissy.
‘You came up with it? You said you read about it on the forums.’
‘Screw you, I won’t tell you anything, I’ll do everything myself and not share!’
‘Guys, we’ve got a rat! Abandon ship!’
‘What did you just call me?’ yelled Nick, now thoroughly pissed off. His face was all twisted in rage, hands curled into fists, and he was ready to attack QQ.
‘Hey, bro, he’s just joking. Why do you take it so close to heart?’ I interrupted, seeing that the conversation was about to turn into a fistfight.
‘Have you heard what he called me?’ Nick wouldn’t let go.
‘Of course I am joking. You don’t even look like a rat, more like a hamster. Same fat cheeks.’
A second later Nick knocked QQ off his feet and they fell to the floor with a thud. Nick was nearly two times heavier than QQ, thanks to his beer-heavy diet, and he easily overpowered QQ. I think QQ realized that his chances were nearing zero, so he didn’t try to fight back, he just tried to say something, but Nick’s choking hands put an end to any such attempt. After ten seconds of standing there, dumbfounded, I rushed to QQ’s rescue. My efforts were in vain; only a tractor may have been able to pull Nick off. After a couple of minutes of trying to reason with him, Nick finally got tired of this romping about and left his victim alone. It took QQ some time to straighten himself and restore his breath.
‘Okay, fatty, you win. Where did you learn those moves, I wonder? Your technique is very similar to Honda from StreetFighter, and the weight category is about the same. Admit it, I’m right!’
This time I managed to throw myself between QQ and Nick and stop Nick’s next attempt to get at QQ.
‘Enough, guys,’ I yelled. ‘That’s enough!’
‘He’s provoking you, and you react to it like an idiot. Be smarter than him, ignore him.’
‘QQ, stop it! Why do you keep provoking him? Do you feel inferior to fatter people?’
‘Nope, no complexes here. Just a lousy mood. Okay, Nick, I am sorry, I was wrong.’
‘Forget it. Now, where was I?’
‘You were going to tell us about the new scheme from the forums.’
‘Ah, yeah. It’s called 3rd Party Billing/Processing, depending on who you ask. For instance, Mr. A wants to sell his good through the Internet and accept credit cards. He registers on the website of a company that provides 3rd party processing services and registers his good there as well. He then receives basic code to paste onto his own website and he’s all set.’
‘Nick, what do we have to do with it? Are you going to sell your old socks and underwear? If you think there’s going to be high demand for those, go ahead. Although, and I am telling you this in strict confidence, to sell something, you need to own something first.’
‘Right, sorry. I just don’t see what we can possibly sell.’
‘We’ll sell the air,’ said Nick, grinning.
‘The air? I’ve heard about a dude selling cans of Alpine air. A stupid affair, if you ask me.’
‘Nick, do you really think someone will buy canned Moscow smog?’ I laughed heartily.
‘Oh my god, you morons! When I said ‘air’, I meant we’d be selling blanks! We’ll put up pictures of absolutely anything, the bloody moon probe or whatever, and sell that!’
‘But we don’t have a moon probe,’ pressed QQ.
‘I think I see what Nick is getting at. If I understand correctly, we don’t need to physically own the moon probe. I just don’t get who’s going to buy our blanks. After a couple of orders we’ll start getting complaints and get shut down!’
‘Do you still not get it? We’ll be merchants and shoppers at once!’
‘One-person show?’ QQ was still being sarcastic.
‘Exactly. We’ll go to our site, using a proxy and buy the damn probes using stolen cards. By the rules, the money from the sales gets accumulated on the 3rd party account, and gets transferred to the merchant, aka us, once a month.’
‘Yes, I am a genius, but I’m not fat. I just have a healthy appetite, unlike you, QQ.’
I remember that at first we took a long time figuring out what to sell. After three hours of searching for something of quality and yet not too popular, so that the 3rd party company couldn’t catch us red-handed stealing the text and pictures from the original owner, I suggested we copy the website of a guy who made birds out of found scraps and bits.
‘No, this won’t fly. Not enough text, and the photos are awful. It’s hard to tell that it’s a bird in real life, and in this photo it looks like a dragon.’
‘It is actually a dragon,’ grinned Nick, pleased that he managed to get back at QQ for once.
‘A dragon, a flying elephant, same shit. This site is no good to us.’
Besides, the Internet was much smaller back then, and, in theory, a professional would have no trouble finding the source of the stolen content.
‘Here, a great website. Let’s copy this one. Look at these beautiful daubs, and with such lengthy descriptions, too! The counter is also showing that the site isn’t exactly an internet star.’
‘Mine is even better! See this? Some crazy dude makes all of this out of wood, let him be our hero!’ QQ’s find seemed too popular to me, so we went with Nick’s idea, and set to work.
At the time anyone could easily conjure up a decent website using just Notepad with a basic knowledge of HTML. An hour later, the site was ready. Domain registration and buying hosting space took another 15 minutes, and, naturally, it was all paid for with a stolen credit card. It was the first time we did something like that, so it took 24 hours to process. Upset that we couldn’t start right now, we decided to build another clone, i.e. register a similar domain, buy hosting, and edit the site slightly. We decided to have a backup plan in case the cardholder noticed the transaction and the first website got blocked. That would have delayed the sales by at least two days, and we couldn’t allow this to happen. 24 hours later, we registered on the 3rd party website and an hour after that we sold our first painting for 425 dollars.
We set to work. We did two transactions a day on average, and QQ found another company that offered 3rd party processing, so we hooked up the clone site to it and started selling the same Asian paintings. 25 days later, when the company processed the payments, we managed to sell $12,400 worth of painting. The other site only made us $9000 since we started a bit later. In a few days Smirnov had the payments, and we kept buying from ourselves, and even raised the volume of sales. Next month, however, there were a lot of chargebacks. Our sales got blocked, an investigation began, and all the money we had already made that month was frozen.
After a brief period of mourning over the lost income, we started anew, using two methods: site 1 — high prices, rare purchases; site 2 — low prices, regular purchases. It’s hard to tell now which of the two strategies worked better. I can’t remember, and, besides, we were working with 4 companies, each of which had different anti-fraud policies. This worked for another few months, and then our accounts got blocked again. Altogether we earned over $60,000 in three months, and it kept working, but we started losing interest because our accounts kept getting blocked and an income of $2000 a month was of little to no interest to us, and we figured that this was the rate at which we could avoid detection.
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