Security News > 2021 > October > Amazon textbook rental service scammed for $1.5m

From January 2016 through March 2021, according to the indictment, Talsma rented textbooks from the Amazon Rental program in order to sell them for a profit.

He supposedly did so to bypass the 15 book limit Amazon placed on textbook rentals.

His alleged fraud scheme involved using Amazon gift cards to rent the textbooks and prepaid MyVanilla Visa cards with minimal credit balances to cover the buyout price charged for books not returned.

"Geoffrey Mark Talsma made sure that the MyVanilla Visa cards did not have sufficient credit balances, or any balance at all, when the textbook rentals were past due so that Amazon could not collect the book buyout price from those cards."

As the scheme progressed, the indictment says, Talsma "Recruited individuals, including defendants Gregory Mark Gleesing, Lovedeep Singh Dhanoa, and Paul Steven Larson, and other individuals known to the grand jury, to allow him to use their names and mailing addresses to further continue receiving rental textbooks in amounts well above the fifteen-book limit."

Talsma would call Amazon's customer service department and claim that instead of the textbooks ordered, he had received other items that could not be returned by mail, like flammable objects.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/10/15/amazon_textbook_rental/