It speaks very badly of eBay that such a cultish and abusive group was allowed to exist.

What makes you think such a "cultish and abusive group" is especially uncommon?

Either they are exceptionally good at covering their tracks and silencing victims, or, this is a rare case that people have been writing about for months.

It isn't always as egregious as the eBay case. SLAPPs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...) are one example. Then there are Twitter-fests such as Arizona Public Service (https://azcapitoltimes.com/news/2019/07/30/aps-allies-attack...), involvement in political campaigns against elected critics (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/technology/amazon-pramila...).

On the other hand, there's the Kerr-McGee corporation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Silkwood), Monsanto (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/07/monsanto-fu...), and Bloomberg LP (https://www.npr.org/2020/04/14/828565428/bloomberg-news-kill...).

Corporate investigations is an industry, too. (https://www.aegis.com/investigations/corporate-investigation...)

Them getting caught required a bit of extraordinary luck on the part of the victims and a lot of over-confidence on the part of the perps.

After almost getting spotted once they came back and the victims managed to get a photo of their tag.

Without that the whole thing would probably be dismissed by people as a crazy conspiracy theory.

There are many. Their feature sets vary a lot.

That's a really odd statement since Stitch's main feature is multi-channel inventory synchronization and Square doesn't do that at all.

It sounds like they’ll be building tools that do stuff like that on core Square product.

Yes it looks like somebody a: copied unencrypted backups to S3 and b: set the s3 bucket to be publicly accessible

BIG oops.

Sounds like they pulled a credit check. I got the same kind of questions when I applied for regular merchant (credit card processing) account.

Why is it that people think that they can open a payment account, transfer thousands of dollars into it as their first transaction and no one will ask any questions or be the least bit suspicious?

Yes I was kind of thinking of filing this under "the 1% problem". Who does that much money first time around?

Businesses? Depending on the industry a $10K invoice isn't exactly huge.

Criminals. This kind of activity would trip any fraud detection algorithm.

What utter nonsense.

Agreed. Actually there is a Sivers book, it's called "Anything you want"

Thanks for the clarification Patrick. I was too busy fuming to explain.

Exactly. I can and will be moving elsewhere. My three puny sites can hardly be making their servers tick over the most active only gets ~2000 uniques on a good month.