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What this guy can take advantage will be victims don't check their bank statements carefully and he can get away with the money, or else he will be in pretty bad shape to handle all the charge-backs. I will say the chance of a stolen POS is low as his goal is to get the money. If he borrows the POS from his merchant friend for this purpose, then that is not cool at all.

To me this is not a serious security threat to ordinary people.

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Charge a penny and then refund it to capture the details for a recurring charge. 30 days from then you can hit the card with a $5 charge using some ambiguous merchant name like "Card validation services".

90% of people don't inspect their bank statements close enough to notice something like this. Get 1000 people and that's a healthy sum for a criminal to live off of.

> 90% of people don't inspect their bank statements close enough

But 10% of people is more than enough (by a substantial margin) to get the operation shut down, the money (all of it) returned, and probably land the guy in jail.

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