Writing about “parcel agents” has become something of a tradition on the pages of our journal. A parcel agent is a person who… well… receives goods from online stores, packs them into large boxes and ships them wherever management tells them to. After a month — usually, though there are exceptions — the instructions stop coming. And so does the pay. At first you think you have been cheated. But then the police turn up and explain that it is the parcel agent who has cheated everyone: “Come along, my friend, a criminal penalty awaits you.” Some end up in a world of extreme minimalism as a result. And some end up at our law firm.
Nastya and the Ballpoint Pen
Anastasia studies economics in Berlin. A student, as we all know, is not exactly swimming in money. She would like to work, but there are restrictions. Job seekers like her usually do not turn to the Agentur für Arbeit (the German employment agency) but to remote-work websites or special groups on social networks. The twenty-first century, the digital world and all that. Only the brain stays analog. That is the only explanation for why this kind of work still attracts young people. However much has been written about parcel fraud, there are always new takers willing to wade into the mud — both the electronic kind and the very real kind. Anastasia was one of them. On its website, the employer looked like a company with many years of experience, specializing in delivering electronics to Russia on pre-order. It did not occur to Anastasia to check whether this company even had a website of its own, but she studied the contract thoroughly.
After printing out what was described as a “standard employment contract” with genuinely attractive terms — a decent salary, continued pay during illness, paid vacation — Nastya armed herself with a ballpoint pen and went through every clause meticulously, noting where it departed from common practice and from the rules of employment law. The employer received the scanned amendments more than graciously and apologized that its lawyers had sent her an outdated version of the contract. Soon Nastya signed the new contract she had revised herself, put the pen aside and rolled up her sleeves. Almost every day, mobile phones, cameras and tablets were delivered to her apartment. Anastasia’s job was to collect a certain quantity of goods, fill a large box with them, take it to the post office and send it to the Russian capital.
As Anastasia was told in her online job interview, the company’s purpose was to let Russian citizens buy the goods they needed at a lower price — and Nastya had a key role to play. According to the employer, the price would almost double if the goods were imported through customs in the usual way. This way, however… the purchases were supposedly made by a private individual, and this supposed private individual was sending a parcel of electronics home to friends. Customs had no interest in such goods, and the items reached the people who had ordered them at a good price, to everyone’s satisfaction.
A Little History
The first major criminal trial of a gang of “carders” — the name for the “profession” of those electronic geniuses whose talent lies in cracking payment card data and thereby gaining access to bank accounts and their transactions — took place in the USA in 2013. There had been prosecutions before, but they always concerned small fry; this time the gang’s organizer was arrested. The trial laid bare the entire way such groups operate. And nothing new has happened in this field since.
The indictment against the gang’s organizer states that Gorlov, “with co-conspirators known and unknown to the Grand Jury,” founded the criminal organization “Atlanta Alliance,” made up of “carders” who used credit card data stolen on the internet to buy various goods. In addition, the “Atlanta Alliance” had its own network of “parcel agents” and “reshippers” who received these goods by mail, repacked them and forwarded them to specified addresses — in return for a set percentage of the value of each shipment.
This criminal organization was active from January 2005 to August 2010 and obtained millions of US dollars by fraud. The investigation was handled by the US Postal Service, because the fraudsters paid for shipping the stolen goods with credit cards that were stolen as well. And that was not all — after paying, they swapped the address label on the parcel, so that the cardholder received an additional bill for the forwarding.
Members of the “Atlanta Alliance” communicated through several websites, including Craigslist and Monster.com, one of the world’s largest job boards, using code names. The indictment records that, to carry out his plans, Gorlov recruited accomplices who supplied the “Atlanta Alliance” with data from frequently used cards, such as Visa “gift cards.” To communicate with other “carders,” Gorlov ran the website xpse.ru, where among other things he posted lists of the goods his alliance wanted to acquire.
Besides atlantalliance.com, Gorlov and his accomplices ran several other websites through which fraudulently acquired goods could be forwarded. These goods were shipped via the United States Postal Service (USPS), with the postage also paid using stolen credit cards. To sell the stolen goods, Gorlov and his accomplices set up a website of their own, digsale.ru.
This Gorlov will be serving time in the United States for a long while, as will his colleagues from the Thai group — but that does not change the essence of the matter: the structure of this criminal business remains stable and is reproduced like a template by all kinds of internet gangs. And it is obvious that Anastasia had an extremely important role to play — covering the tracks and becoming the prime suspect. Which is exactly what happened. Even though the media have reported on this a hundred times…
The Post Office Is Closed
Within a month, Nastya packed six large boxes and sent them to Russia. She liked the job — a light workload and the chance to keep up with her studies; now all she had to do was wait for a decent salary. That is exactly where the catch came. After a month of work and a few motivating emails from management full of praise and promises of career advancement, there was suddenly silence. Nobody answered her messages any more, and nothing arrived on her Visa card. After two weeks of waiting for money and further instructions, Anastasia realized she had been cheated. She resigned herself to her fate and went on looking for a new job. But instead of a new employment contract, Anastasia received a police summons. Criminal proceedings had been opened against her under the following provisions of the German Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch, StGB): fraud (Betrug, § 263 StGB) and reckless money laundering (leichtfertige Geldwäsche, § 261 StGB). Before going to the police, Anastasia turned to our law firm for help — which was exactly the right thing to do.
For our lawyers, cases involving clients like this — parcel agents and reshippers — are familiar territory. The lawyers had to show that Anastasia was herself the victim of a fraud and that her true role in the story had been concealed from her by a sham employment contract. To that end, all of Anastasia’s email correspondence with the supposed employer was submitted to the public prosecutor’s office (Staatsanwaltschaft). But there was a difficulty. The fact that Anastasia had examined the employment contract so carefully and amended it did not exactly suggest that the suspect had joined a criminal gang out of sheer naivety. German law applies the standard of the “objective third party” — how an uninvolved observer would assess the situation. Our lawyers had to show that, despite her thoroughness on some points, Anastasia had no real idea of what the company she supposedly worked for actually did.
When the investigation is complete, the public prosecutor’s office weighs the evidence and the arguments put forward in the suspect’s favor and decides whether to bring charges or to discontinue the proceedings (Einstellung des Verfahrens). If the balance tips in the suspect’s favor by even one percentage point, the proceedings will most likely be discontinued.
In Anastasia’s case, our lawyers succeeded in building the argument in such a way that the proceedings against her were discontinued under § 170 Abs. 2 StPO (German Code of Criminal Procedure) because no criminal offense had been committed. We hope this will remain the last case of its kind in our firm’s practice. Experience shows, however, that crime in the digital sphere will continue to grow. And our lawyers’ experience will be in all the greater demand.
All rights reserved. Copying or republishing this article requires a link to the original source.
