Disclosure of a fraud scheme involving a well-known American brand of household chemicals

It all started with the task of inspecting the company SaleIdea

‍An unknown person opened the website Saleidea.org: a kind of Ukrainian marketplace of сosmetics, household chemicals and dietary supplements. That is, all household treasure, which does not require registration and can be profitably resold.

But a critical mistake was made – in the range of the store we found products of the American brand AmIdea! According to the insight, this company does not allow resale of products outside the official dealer networks offline or online. So we deal with a dishonest retailer.

‍Technical part of research work

Gathering information from web archives, social media and open sources, Molfar analysts were able to find out the following facts.

The first activity of the site was in 2014. The company has pages on social networks Facebook, instagram and Pokupon. In 2017, the site changed its owner to a Ukrainian entrepreneur, and from that moment the active sale of cosmetics begins. The company has unconfirmed addresses of stores in four Ukrainian cities: Kyiv, Dnipro, Lviv and Odesa. We managed to establish the total and monthly revenue of the company.

‍Who is the owner of the site SaleIdea?

‍The analysis of social networks, including employees on LinkedIn and related contacts, analysis of Instagram interactions (posts, likes, comments) and technical registration data of the domain continues.

After founding several mobile numbers and bank card numbers, comparing names and surnames – we move on to direct ordering products.

We receive the name of the sender, another mobile number and feedback for sending. For a number of confidential actions that we have revealed in the company's review, we are identifying two people. Then a brief analysis of each person individually, mostly checking personal information and paid data from search services. We suspect both of them of involvement in the management of the site.

We go deeper, after checking all the found numbers, we come to the most important contact – the Polish number, which corresponds to a real businessman on Facebook and LinkedIn.

‍Our social engineers are already connected here – a few calls, interesting confusing stories about where the number came from, and we confirm all the necessary data. There is a recording of the conversation, there is a review of the company, there is a review on the owners – what's next?

‍The results of the investigation are the confidential property of the customer

‍Once the information has been collected and passed on, the Molfar team is no longer allowed to use it for their own purposes. The person for whom we did the research used the information in the most appropriate way in this case – to accuse the retailer of violating the terms of trade and tax evasion.

Now we have schematically told a small case with a very revealing result. Mostly due to the fact that the order was fulfilled, including on our own initiative.

Molfar continues active business intelligence, saving your time and money.

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