Merchant

Merchants, under criminal control or colluding with illicit operators, enable fraudulent chargebacks by:

• Fabricating sales or inflating transaction amounts and then facilitating bogus refund requests.
• Maintaining accounts and records that support or corroborate fraudulent chargeback claims.
• Monitoring chargeback ratios to stay below thresholds that trigger acquirer or card network scrutiny, allowing ongoing laundering activity.

These retail businesses, whether complicit or unaware, introduce counterfeit goods into legitimate consumer channels, mixing illicit revenue with lawful sales.

• Financial institutions processing merchant payments or deposits face difficulty identifying which proceeds derive from counterfeit products.
• Criminals exploit merchants' routine transactions to commingle illicit funds, hindering detection efforts.

A merchant role, whether legitimate or criminally controlled, processes online orders and payments. Criminals posing as merchants:

• Generate artificial sales revenue from illicit funds.
• Manipulate refund mechanisms to reroute criminal proceeds onto cards or accounts.

These tactics obscure the fraudulent origin of funds, challenging financial institutions' risk assessments and transaction monitoring.

Merchants, whether complicit or unaware, become conduits for laundering illicit proceeds by:

• Having unauthorized deposits channeled through their accounts, intermingling legitimate customer payments with criminal funds.
• Allowing criminals (knowingly or unknowingly) to open aggregator or sub-merchant accounts in their name, masking beneficial ownership.

Financial institutions face difficulty distinguishing illicit inflows when these payments appear as normal business transactions.