Matt Bergwall was a gifted coder who could have gotten a job at any tech company. He decided to go in another direction by hacking UPS accounts to manipulate tracking data, and faking returns of items like a $41,000 Rolex.
Refunding first emerged alongside the early-2010s explosion in online retail and typically involved simple methods like buying items and claiming they never arrived (like my toaster). But as companies caught on, tactics evolved. In 2019, a fraudster who went by Bob published Bob’s Refunding eBook, which collected a number of methods that had been circulating on hacker forums and other underworld sites. (Nowadays, such tips circulate mostly on Telegram, the anonymous chat app on which much contemporary fraud is coordinated. Bob is credited in fraud circles with popularizing FTID — Fake Tracking ID, wherein the scammer returns an empty box to a retailer but edits the shipping label provided by the company to an address that is slightly different from the warehouse where returns are meant to go. The package gets scanned by, say, UPS when it’s picked up