Shipping Address = Freight Forwarder's address

[hasms]

Recently have gotten a couple orders that caught my eye enough, that I did a Google search on the shipping address. Relatively small order size...nothing suspicious there. But it turns out the shipping address was that of a freight forwarder. There was a strange code entered as part of the recipient's name...presumably a tracking code for the freight forwarder.

In one case, the billing address AVS matched to Florida, but the IP address was in South America. But the shipping address was that of a Florida freight forwarder.

In the other case, it was a non-US issued card (so no AVS). Billing address was Florida and IP address was Florida. But again the shipping address was that of a Florida freight forwarder (a different one this time).

Does these sound like legitimate customers that simply want there own forwarder to handle the outbound shipping? Or fraudulent orders?

[jsinger]

We get lots of those from Miami, usually bound for Central America or the Caribbean. We don't export but we have shipped to a few small orders and they've been fine.

[foghead]

I've also done a good few of these , IP address in Argentina, ship to a forwarder in Miami, and surprisingly everything went through fine on each. In the case of my orders it seemed to be that nothing good ever actually arrives in the mail in Argentina (I use USPS), it's all pilfered in the system before delivery, so the smart guys all have their own tame forwarder in the US. All the same, my orders have all been less than $200 - I'd be very nervous about anything more.

[Ledfish]

Ditto....we have done several of these as well without any problems to a few places in Central America. The orders are not really big or even for multiple units of the same item. Another thing we have noticed is that they are not all that frequent either.

Intially, I checked with a friend of mine in Miami who does a lot of business in Central America and he said that it is very commonly done to ensure reliable delivery by upper class Central American based citizens.