Upstate NY Lacrosse Store Attacked With 22,000 Fake Sales

When you are a small, family owned supply store with a total of 17 employees, located in Chittenango, New York, you don't often get 22,000 on-line sales transactions in one weekend. So, when Ryan Powell began looking at the sales reports from New Year's weekend, he knew something wasn't right. In fact, he knew something was very wrong.

The Powell brothers names are synonymous with Syracuse University lacrosse. Casey, Ryan and Mikey Powell were each All-Americans and starred for the Orange from the late 1990's through 2004. The fast paced sport is in their blood. Ryan and Casey made it their business by starting the lacrosse equipment supply company. On the afternoon of December 30th, at the start of this year's long holiday weekend, according to Fernando Alba of syracuse.com, the Powell brothers' business began getting a ton of fraudulent sales.

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Thousands of orders began pouring in, all through the weekend. Most of the sales were strangely for the same amount, $12.71. Powell Brothers Lacrosse had trouble stopping the fake orders without turning away actual business sales. Eventually, they began to reject all credit card purchases from the online store. A costly move and not something any business owner wants to do, ever. “We had to stop the bleeding from whoever is trying to make these transactions,” Powell told syracuse.com. “We had a serious game of fraud that happened here.”

Of the 22,000 orders, only about 2,000 of them ended up getting charged to stolen credit cards. Ryan Powell and his 17 employees spent the day on January 3rd, on the phone with customers asking for refunds. “It’s not really how we wanted to start our 2023,” Powell commented to syracuse.com. According to Powell, the store is still processing refunds. A difficult issue for a business about to go into their busy season. Best of luck to the Powell Brothers in getting this awful issue resolved.