The Security Mentor

Washington Post, via Techdirt:
credit card fraudsters prey on counterfeit goods fraudsters by impersonating spammers

When you get an ad in your email for magic pills, there are two crooks involved. One is the person who sweeps up garbage (literally -- the pills have been analyzed and they're worse than inert) and presses it into pills. The email comes from a specialized spammer who takes a cut of the sales in return for using an army of taken-over computers to send out the spam.

It starts getting funny when the credit card crooks come into the picture. They've taken to stealing credit cards and approaching scammers. They pretend that their crime of choice is spamming but they're actually out to defraud the scammer. They pretend they're going to send out spam, then they don't, but they do use stolen credit cards to buy the "enhancement" products, so the credit card thieves get a cut of the fake sales of fake products which were supposed to defraud a consumer but actually defrauded the credit card company.

Couldn't happen to more deserving people.

What does this mean for you, except as entertainment? A side effect of all this is pill bottles full of compressed garbage showing up in innocent people's physical mailboxes. Check your credit card statement online right away, and if you see unexpected charges call your bank and report fraud.