From Russia With Love

One week last fall, before my company, GiftSpot.com, implemented automated fraud screening, we experienced a rash of purchases of gift certificates from an Internet address in Russia that were so obviously fraudulent that we "expired" them. Most hackers would have had the sense to know that the gig was up and shop elsewhere, so imagine our surprise when we got this e-mail from "Pavel" (not his real name), one of our Russian "customers." (I've preserved the spelling and punctuation from his e-mails.)

To: GiftSpot.com Customer Service

From: Pavel@****.com

Subject: HELP ME USE YOUR CERTIFICATE.............

hi today a recive giftspot certificate when i open link - write it~sexpired. How expired when i recive it~s today???

please help how use this certificate on ammount 1000$?????

We appreciated Pavel's chutzpah because he was our first customer to complain about not being able to spend his illicitly obtained gift certificate. Our development manager Scott Taylor looked up the thief's Internet address and found a Web site that identified him as a 14-year-old Russian boy in the city of Kazan. Just for fun, our customer service representative Joyce St. Clair composed this letter to Pavel and had it translated into Russian. (The translator took a few liberties, making it even more threatening.)

To: Pavel@***.com

From: GiftSpot.com Customer Service

Subject: Re: HELP ME USE YOUR CERTIFICATE.............

Pavel,

Officer Taylor would be more than happy to talk to you about your certificate. Please call him at ***-***-**** and make sure you have your credit card and other identification handy. If we don't hear from you in the next 24 hours, we'll be forced to assume that this purchase was done fraudulently, and we'll be turning the matter over to your local authorities in Kazan.

Agyent Taylor ot nashay militziay ochen hochetsa govoreet c vami obcertifekata. Pazhalsta pozvonit v nomere ***-***-****. Pazhalsta emyayte kreditichnaya karta i identifikatsiya. Pazhalsta otvechayte v 24 chasa, a to mui budem otdat etu problemu v miliziyu v Kazan.

Joyce St. Clair

Customer Service Representative,

GiftSpot.com

Not 20 minutes later we received this reply, allegedly from Pavel's father, who we'll call Kamel.

To: GiftSpot.com Customer Service

From: Pavel@****.com

Subject: Re: HELP ME USE YOUR CERTIFICATE.............

HELLO GIFTSPOT

IT~S NOW SPEAK FOR ME ABOUT THIS NUMBER IT SEE ON HACKPAGE IN INTERNET ON WWW.MONEY-BOARD.DA.RU SORRY BUT MY SON USE HACK CREDIT CARD.... IT~S 14 YEARS OLD WE ALL VERY SORRY ABOUT IT PLEASE FOGET ABOUT IT....

WITH BEST REGARD KAMEL FUZLOV(PAVEL~S FATHER)

We passed this message on to the fraud screening division of the payment processing company CyberSource, which had a Russian-speaking employee infiltrate the Web site in question. Not surprisingly, she found people trading credit card information there. Last I heard, CyberSource was going to try to infiltrate the site and shut it down, and indeed the site no longer responds.