In honor of today’s National Puzzle Day, I’m going to share with you a post I wrote several years ago about something that has been puzzling me ever since.
The Unofficial Project
I’m going to tell you about one of my favorite (unofficial) parts of my job, and then maybe you can help me solve a mystery.
Every quarter, our office assistant helps me keep a spreadsheet and mail hundreds of gift cards to people who took part in our quarterly promotions. Only companies are eligible to participate in these promotions, meaning that you can’t go to the store and buy $50 worth of product for yourself and get a gift card for yourself–you have to buy it for your company. One person per company can receive up to five gift cards per promotion. After that, someone else from the same company can play five times, etc. You can mail in your form or post it online. So those are the rules, in fine print at the bottom of the flyers.
The weird part, and thus my unofficial project, began during our first promotion two years ago, when I happened to notice that the handwriting on an envelope matched the handwriting on an envelope I’d received the previous month. But the names were different. Later on, I got a third envelope with a third name, but still obviously the same handwriting in the same ink on the same envelope. (They were all pre-printed with a pharmacy name and address in the return spot that had been whited out. I allowed it, since even though they tried to hide it, it was clearly the same company.) That quarter I received five of those in all, all for different names, and the writer occasionally clearly trying (but failing) to write differently enough so I wouldn’t know it was the same person.
It all seemed pretty silly, considering it was perfectly within the rules to receive five all from the same person. I assumed they just hadn’t read the fine print and thought they could be sneaky. We sent them their gift cards.
Things Get Weirder
The next quarter, it got weirder. By now I was very familiar with the handwriting, but then the addresses on the forms started changing, as well. Meaning they weren’t all going to the same company. And the person was going farther out of her way to appear to be multiple people–even at one point sending an envelope postmarked three hours away and in a different state than normal.
So even though it was obviously one person doing all of it, she was having the money mailed to different names in different places. And I’m talking $10 and $15 gift cards to places like movie theatres and Panera…nothing extravagant. It all seemed a lot of effort for so little return. What sort of person, we wondered, would commit fraud over a $15 gift card? Because that’s what this person was doing, essentially.
A Second Culprit
Then I started noticing a new weasel. Different names, different address in a different part of the country. No company name. A certain amount of Googling led me to discover that this guy, Marv, was the owner of the store he was supposedly buying $50 worth of product from repeatedly. Meaning this guy was purchasing product from us at a discount already, then “buying” it from himself and sending us the invoice in the hopes of getting more money from us. We shut that whole operation down immediately, as the proof was conclusive.
I wondered whether there could be any connection between the two (there still doesn’t seem to be). So I started keeping a separate spreadsheet with all of the information for anyone who seemed shady. (Where I recognized envelopes, handwriting, etc., or two cards were going to two names at the same address.) I started Googling addresses of the shady ones and discovering that many of them were home addresses instead of business addresses. (We are still sending cards to them for the time being since the person may just be putting down their home address but bought product for their employer. As long as they list a company, we send a card.) And that’s when I began to realize how deep this whole thing really went.
The Plot Thickens
Things like a phone number, an email address, or a repeated name from a previous promotion started linking people all over the country. In the online entries we receive, I currently have five different people in four different states with the same last four on their card.
Then one name struck me as completely fake, so I Googled it. And sure enough, Holly Holiday was actually a Glee character. And Arroyo High School, where Holly claimed to work, had an alumnus who went on to appear on Glee. Arroyo was also six hours away from the domestic address where Holly requested her card sent. These people were just making up all sorts of stuff!
Scamazon
Then I started observing that, from the online orders, the ones to Amazon almost all showed only a screenshot of a piece of a receipt. And they came almost exclusively from people with shady email addresses–non-professional, Gmail/Hotmail addresses that looked made up on the spot–or were they? So I started my “last fours” tab, identifying aliases via credit card. I dubbed this particular shadiness “Scamazon”. What exactly were they doing? Did they have their own online stores that they were ordering from, like Marv with his brick and mortar? Were they ordering things long enough to receive invoices and then cancelling them? What crucial information was missing from the hidden parts of the invoices that they weren’t showing me?
I began Googling email addresses to see if they were attached to anything else online. Had the usernames themselves ever been used in other places? Some had; some hadn’t. I was just scouring the internet for anything I could find about these people now. What was the connection!? Why were so many of the same groups of people receiving cards in different places all over the country!? My spreadsheet had started to look like the Excel version of in a TV show, when the detective has a map and photographs on the wall, and pieces of red yarn webbing out, connecting all the pieces. Different tabs connected different individuals and identified different possible scams–or were they ALL related? And that’s how I finally found out about Glitchmas.
Glitchmas
One particularly cocky S.O.B. used the word “glitchmas” in his cheap email address, the Googling of which enlightened me to a world of crime I had theretofore been unaware of.
“Glitching” (or “glittering”), it turns out, is a term in the world of professional couponers that refers to when a coupon contains a glitch–meaning there’s an error somewhere that allows you to get way more money than intended by the producers of the coupon. And “Glitchmas” is an event wherein this wretched hive of scum and villainy gathers online like hyenas to celebrate their crime with gift card giveaways. (This event used to have another term until authorities realized what was going on and they had to change it. People have actually done time over this, so it’s like they’re always moving around to different online locations and using secret code words.)
In fact, following the Glitchmas email led me straight to a giveaway of the exact gift cards we were mailing, during the exact quarter we were mailing them. Coincidence? So the question we kept asking ourselves–what kind of person commits fraud just to get a $10 gift card?–was finally answered. The same kind of person who commits fraud every single day to get a few extra bucks or cents.
Unsolved Mystery
What I still can’t figure out, though, is this.
What’s going on with Scamazon? Do they have their own stores, or are they cancelling orders?
Is it all just one person, or just a handful of people, with different credit cards, creating email address after email address? My spreadsheet grows ever larger, but how many people are really on it?
Who are the end users of the gift cards? Regardless of how many people are actually ordering them, they’re still going to different addresses all over the country. Who are he/she/whoever sending them to? And for what purpose? What do they get out of it if they’re not using the money themselves? That’s what I need to find out. Not just for work, but for my own sanity.
