The Ultimate Beginners Guide to Refunding Expensive Items PART 3
Part 3 - How to Identify Police Departments to Use Safely
First off, the bigger the county, the better. Smaller pds potentially have more time to investigate frivolous claims like yours. Beyond that, the shipping address for your order determines which police department you're going to file your police report with, whichever county that address is in, is the PD you'll be working with. But before your get the order shipped out, you need to determine if that county's police department approves police reports without any investigation whatsoever. To do that, you need to preform a test very similar to the one you'll use to make your store list. You have to file a police report for theft using fake information (more on that in a minute), at that same police department. Once you file the report, it'll go into manual review before approval. If the police attempt to call, text, or email you to follow up about the report, ignore the contact request and mark that county as a no-go. If you receive an email a few days later, with some version of "Here's your approved police report pdf" from that police department, it means that police department is good to use when filing the police report for your order.
You can't just file a totally random police report, you have to file a similar type of report to the one you're going to file for your actual order, albeit with different details. The following bullet point list will tell you how to determine what info to put on your fake police report.
- Type of crime ---> Theft
- Name ---> Any reasonable sounding fake name
- Address ---> Any single family house in the county, use zillow to find one
- Email ---> Any burner gmail or yahoo, make one just for this purpose
- Phone number ---> Any voip, like textnow
- DOB and other personal info ---> Make it up, this isn't verified, and if it is, that county is a no go
- Location of the theft ---> The address you used from zillow
- What time the theft occured ---> Whatever day and time the package was delivered
- What was stolen ---> Any expensive item similar, but not the same, as what you plan to refund
- Quantity of items stolen ---> A ridiculous but somewhat believable high amount, 10-20k worth of whatever the item is.
- Narrative of what happened ---> Common sense, some version of they said my package was delivered but I didn't receive it or the box was empty
Willing to prosecute? ---> No, absolutely not
The goal here is to file an exaggerated version of the police report you plan to file, to determine if they're just approving reports without following up and to make sure your smaller report won't raise red flags (because the larger one got pushed through). This ensures you'll know for sure if this police department will work, based on if they send you an approved pdf of the report without follow up.
Like I said earlier, a lot of people balk at filing police reports in general, let alone false ones, so let me explain why this is completely safe. First of all, make sure you file the fake police report on a burner phone or a public computer (they can see the ip address of the report filed) and you'll be fine even if they do try to follow up. But regardless, police stations don't have the time or manpower to spare chasing down everyone who files a police report, every single one is overworked and understaffed. Even if they do an initial follow up, like call, text, email, ask to come to the location, or attempt to contact you in any way, ignore it and move on to the next county. Don't use any of those same details in your next tests. There is zero danger in filing a false police report to test a police departments response if you do it properly.
Filing a police report associated with your own name is likely a little scarier for a lot of you, but again, let me put your mind at ease. It is almost literally impossible for it to proven beyond a reasonable doubt that you received a package you claimed not to have, if you go about doing it correctly. Even if you have to sign for it, claiming the box was damaged and empty is impossible to prove a lie, and that's even more true if you don't sign. The police know this, and that's why even if they did have the time and manpower to investigate you for such a petty reason (they don't), they wouldn't. The only thing that happens with these reports, is the company calls the police station, and confirms the name address timing and incident details of the report you gave them with the police departments secretary. Refunding is the best way to get into fraud for a lot of reasons, but chief among them is it's almost impossible to directly prove as fraud. Of course, a dedicated investigation that unveiled a systemic pattern of refunds under one person across the country could provide enough circumstantial evidence to possibly persuade a jury, but it would take way more than you'd be capable of doing to catch the eye of anyone who could run an investigation like that. This is the type of fraud that slips through the cracks of a bloated system that expanded too rapidly for it's own good, and is damn near impossible to prove even on the rare occasion when it doesn't fall through the cracks.