Reshipping is a fraud scheme in which goods bought with stolen payment data are shipped to an intermediary, often an unwitting “work from home” recruit, who repackages and forwards them to the bad actor, usually overseas. The reshipper’s address launders the delivery trail the way a mule account launders money.
How Reshipping Scams Work
Operators recruit “package processors” through fake job listings promising easy pay for receiving and forwarding parcels. Orders placed with stolen cards ship to the recruit’s home address, which is clean: it matches a real person with no fraud history and defeats simple address screening. The recruit forwards the goods using prepaid labels, the merchandise disappears abroad, and when the card fraud surfaces, the paper trail ends at the recruit, who is often unpaid and sometimes legally exposed. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center has warned about these work-from-home reshipping schemes for years.
Signals and Prevention for Merchants
Reshipping leaves patterns: residential addresses suddenly receiving high value orders from multiple unrelated identities, freight forwarder addresses, order composition skewed to resalable goods, and shipping addresses that accumulate orders from different cards and accounts. Address intelligence that tracks outcomes per destination over time, combined with device and identity linking, exposes the hub even when each order looks clean alone.
How Wyllo Helps
Each reshipping order borrows a clean identity, but the destination and the behavior repeat. Wyllo Payment Fraud Protection connects orders across identities to spot the addresses and networks acting as forwarding hubs before more merchandise walks out the door.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are the people doing the reshipping criminals?
Many are victims of a job scam, unaware the packages are bought with stolen cards. That doesn’t protect merchants from the loss, and it can still expose the recruit to legal trouble and unpaid “wages.”
Should merchants block freight forwarders entirely?
Blanket blocks catch legitimate international shoppers who rely on forwarders. Risk scoring the destination in context, order value, identity history, and velocity to that address, protects revenue better than a hard rule.
