Arrested by a scammer who sold off books totaling more than 170 million yen borrowed from Amazon's textbook rental service



Amazon, a major e-commerce site, is

developing a 'paper textbook rental service ' in the United States, and students who cannot afford it can use this system to give lectures without purchasing expensive textbooks. You can receive it. However, a 36-year-old man living in Michigan , USA, was arrested for abusing Amazon's textbook rental service and selling off a huge amount of textbooks totaling more than $ 1.5 million (about 170 million yen) without returning them. rice field.

Portage Man Arrested On Federal Indictment Charging Fraud And Theft From Amazon's Textbook Rental Program | USAO-WDMI | Department of Justice
https://www.justice.gov/Usao-wdmi/pr/2021_1014_Talsma



Amazon textbook rental service scammed for $ 1.5m • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/15/amazon_textbook_rental/

On October 14, 2021, Federal Attorney Andrew Bridge in the Western District of Michigan crossed the border of mail and wire fraud and stolen goods to a 36-year-old man named Jeffrey Mark Hayes Tarsma in Portage, Michigan. He announced that he had been arrested and prosecuted for transportation, misuse of stolen personal information, and false testimony to the FBI.

According to the complaint, Talsma abused Amazon's textbook rental service from January 2016 to March 2021 to carry out a 'sophisticated fraud plan.' Tarsuma created a large number of accounts with different names, addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers, and rented textbooks using Amazon gift cards and prepaid gift cards with small deposits. By using multiple accounts, Tarsuma was able to avoid the limit of '15 books per account' set by Amazon and borrow a huge number of textbooks.

Tarsuma did not return the textbooks borrowed from Amazon, but sold them through local textbook sales companies and the Internet. Originally, Amazon is a mechanism that can collect excess charges from users who have passed the return deadline, but since Tarsuma used a small gift card at the time of rental, Amazon could not withdraw any more amount. That thing.



Tarsuma not only sold the rented textbooks, but also told Amazon's customer service that 'instead of the ordered textbooks, non-returnable items such as combustibles arrived' and 'the rental fee for unordered textbooks was deducted.' They also scammed to avoid textbook rental fees by making complaints and claiming that they did not rent textbooks in the first place.

The indictment also states that Tarsma used the personal information of accomplices such as Glee Mark Gleesing, Love Deep Singh Danoa, and Paul Stephen Larson to create various accounts for fraud. .. Gleesing, Danoa, Larson and others have also been charged as accomplices to Talsma.

Some of the textbooks sold by Tarsuma cost more than $ 100, and the value of about 14,000 textbooks stolen from Amazon by four people totals more than $ 1.5 million. It will be. When convicted, Tarsuma has been up to 20 years for mail and wire fraud, up to 10 years for cross-state transport of stolen goods, up to 5 years for false testimony to the FBI, and up to misuse of stolen personal information. He said he could be sentenced to four years in prison.



in Note, Posted by log1h_ik