turns out paul is engaged to two different women on opposite sides of the country. and who knows how many others in between. so why would international thieves want to trick women into accepting and reshipping so many packages? experts say it s because many american retailers refuse to ship overseas. so to collect their loot the identity thieves need a middleman, a so-called drop, somebody in the united states who can accept the delivery and then forward the stolen merchandise. that s apparently how people like vicki and angela are being used. we got some cardable sites. reporter: and if a thief doesn t already have a drop site, dan clements says it s easy to buy one in one of those criminal chat rooms. here i m saying, you want a valid credit card? give me a drop. reporter: in the thieves market, we negotiate to buy a drop address, where the criminals tell us we can send stolen merchandise.
kind of like throwing tuna to the sharks. and we ll see what happens. all right. let s do it. reporter: we test the waters as clements, pretending to be a thief, offers to sell some of our bait cards. i m going to hit the stopwatch, and we re going to see how long it takes before somebody hits on it. reporter: the response is almost instantaneous. somebody saying, hey, bro. 12 seconds. reporter: at first the thieves appear to be feeling us out to see if we re for real. we have another one. nitro 81 just said howdy. 26 seconds. reporter: but it doesn t take long for the thieves to take the bait and start making purchases with our cards. they re hitting it. reporter: at the credit card monitoring center, the fraudulent charges are beginning to roll in. at first, they re small charges to make sure the card works. they checked it for a dollar. reporter: for a dollar? they re just probing to see if it will work? right. reporter: they even make a small d
twice. did you hear about that one? i heard about that. the guy got busted on the first show. and you know what? he got busted again on the second show. come on. same guy? same guy. reporter: i m thinking it s about time to tell jeff who we really are and what we re really up to. but that s when he gives us some news about wendy. she s coming home tomorrow, i hope. who is that, wendy? yep. reporter: this could be our chance to meet wendy face to face and get to the bottom of this. i think we all ought to get together when she s in town. i ll talk to her. okay. all right. see if we can do this. reporter: we hang around, but not surprisingly, the mysterious wendy doesn t show up. so we invite jeff back to our ch delivery office. hey, how are you? come on in. good to see you. reporter: he s clearly disappointed his fiancee didn t come to see him and begins to open up. first he admits he never got that $18,000 payment as a partner in wendy s business.
created. and guess who the stuff s addressed to. a man named paul. this one is a xbox 360. now, does paul williams live here? no, right now he lives in london. but he s going to be coming here. he s going to be here in january. reporter: turns out vicki met her paul over the internet. and not surprisingly, he s been flooding her with packages too. all kinds of deliveries today. how are you? reporter: another one arrives while we re there. i have a package. reporter: vicki s gone a step further than just receiving packages. watches, shoes. reporter: she s actually been reshipping them overseas. in fact, we saw dhl picking up this one bound for africa. and when we asked vicki to show us a picture of her paul, we see a familiar face. and guess what? he wants to marry vicki, too.
so we ve got one, two, three, four examples where we know stolen credit card or stolen debit card numbers were used. i understand what you re saying. all of this might be bought by stolen credit cards? yes. reporter: this isn t going to be a good day for jeff ball. now that jeff is beginning to realize he s caught up in a scam, we re about to tell him who we really are. i m chris hansen with dateline nbc. hmm. [ agent ] so your policy looks good, is there anything else? why did you buy my husband a falcon? thanks for the falcon. i didn t buy anyone a falcon. sure, you did. you saved us a lot of money on auto insurance. i used that money to buy a falcon. ergo you bought me a falcon. i should ve got a falcon. most people who switch to state farm save on average about $480. what they do with it, well, that s their business. oh, that explains a lot, actually. [ chuckles ] [ male announcer ] another reason people switch to state farm. aw,