To acquire these multiple MIDs, some free trial operators, i.e. Jeremy Johnson of iWorks, are known to utilize desperate people that are struggling financially to form corporations where the ultimate beneficiary is the free trial operator, but on paper the owner is the person that signed on the account, aka “the signer.” In exchange for opening the Visa/Mastercard merchant account, the signer may get paid a nominal monthly fee and is often led to believe that they own a legitimate business.
Often unbeknownst to the signer, their new “business” has only one true purpose: enrich the UBO (the ultimate beneficiary, aka operator) by submitting false information to banks to acquire MIDs to load balance transaction on. Once the UBO obtains the MID from each signer, the UBO uses it to load balance transactions for ostensibly 1 product. Again, this may have been how HNB’s Garcinia Wow processed transactions.
With dozens of signers, sometimes hundreds depending on the amount of revenue the free trial is producing, transactions are spread across the separate merchant accounts. Therefore when a consumer charges back, it looks like each company that is receiving the chargeback is separate, when in reality it is likely just 1 product receiving the orders across multiple MIDs registered to multiple businesses. By design this buys the UBO time to keep the rebills from the free trial going as long as possible, raking in millions of dollars from consumers.
