Like any e-commerce site, we get our fair share of fraudulent transactions.
Generally they’re pretty easy to spot as, in our case, nine times out of ten they’re for heavy metal magazines (Metal Hammer mostly, but sometimes Kerrang) sent to addresses in Indonesia and Malaysia. Why South-East Asian metalheads represent such a huge proportion of our fraud traffic, I really don’t know. It’s just one of those mysteries that makes me happy to be a part of life’s rich tapestry.
We occasionally get some ‘interesting’ orders, but even battle scarred veterans such as ourselves were amused, back in November, when we noticed Girls of FHM (a yearly best -of compilation of the UK lad’s mags choicest bikini shots) ordered for an inmate at a California State Penitentiary. Apparently prisoners aren’t allowed actual pornography, so FHM and the like are popular substitutes.
Curiosity getting the better of us, we undertook some Internet sleuthing and discovered that our prisoner is a recently incarcerated, serial armed robber with links to the notorious MS-13 gang (yeah, those guys with shaved heads and skulls and rude words written in Spanish tattooed all over their faces that you might have seen on 60 Minutes.)
Of course, we sent the order out as per usual, but we weren’t especially surprised on Thursday when we had a call from the bank querying the charge. Apparently the owner of the card had no memory of ordering any magazines from a website in Australia.
The plot thickens, today, when we received the package returned to us with a California Prisons, “Return to Sender – Not in Custody” sticker. I’d like to imagine that our prisoner escaped, but I guess we’ll never really know. As I said, life’s rich tapestry…