123 Importados

» see 123importados.com.br as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Every country has this store. Turkey has had several versions of it and I imagine yours has too, so the recognition here is not about the specific site, which I had never heard of until I went looking. It is about the shape: a page selling a fridge for a third of what a fridge costs, a payment method that cannot be reversed, and a delivery window long enough that nobody complains until it is far too late to matter.

The Brazilian detail that makes it work is the boleto, the printed bank slip that people use to pay for things without a card. You take the number to a bank or an app and the money leaves. There is no chargeback on a boleto and no card issuer to appeal to, which is a fine arrangement for paying an electricity bill and a catastrophic one for paying a stranger. 123 Importados accepted nothing else.

The company behind it was registered as Online Intermediações LTDA in São Paulo, incorporated on 7 January 2020, on a domain that had been bought the previous 17 December. One of the shareholders on the paperwork was a man with prior convictions for drug trafficking. It sold for about five months.

~ the dossier ~

~ how the trick worked ~

The prices were not slightly good. A refrigerator that went for around 2,800 reais anywhere else was listed at roughly a thousand. That is deep enough into implausible that plenty of people looked at it, said out loud that it was probably a scam, and ordered anyway, because a thousand reais against a real chance at a fridge is a bet a lot of households will take (close enough).

Then came the ninety days. A ninety-day delivery window on an appliance is not normal and everybody knew it was not normal, and it was sold as the explanation for the price, some story about import timing and customs. What it actually bought was silence. Someone who ordered in February had no grounds to be angry until May, and by May a few thousand more people had put money in behind them. The site was not selling refrigerators. It was selling a queue.

~ the phone call ~

Complaint sites filled up first, which is where these things usually stay. What broke it open was Celso Russomanno, who has spent decades doing consumer complaints on Brazilian television and is roughly the last person you want looking at your storefront. He put 123 Importados on Cidade Alerta on Record.

On 13 June a segment tried to get the owner on the phone live on air. The call went to the owner's wife instead, who spent it swearing at the program. That aired. still. Whatever margin the operation had left after that was gone, and the site went offline not long after.

~ the raid ~

On 30 June 2020 the Civil Police ran the operation. Eight arrest warrants and twelve search-and-seizure orders, executed across São Paulo state, including Jaú and Mauá. A ninth man was picked up on 6 July, having apparently decided the correct response to eight arrests was to reassemble the group and go again.

The final accounting was more than ten thousand victims and somewhere around ten million reais. Which is not a large fraud by the standards of large frauds, and it is a lot of individual households out a thousand reais each in the middle of the first pandemic year. The site is in the record now mostly as a case study, filed next to every other online store that understood the only genuinely hard part of this is arranging to be paid before anyone can check.

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