I bet the person physically receiving the wine/goods is some gullible, naive person who has been social engineered into thinking they're working for a legit business.
It's like the 419 emails where they are trying to "recruit a remote working employee in our finance department" where your job is actually to receive fraudulent ACH wire transfers and send the money to some overseas destinations, go to a bitcoin ATM and buy bitcoin to send to the scammer, etc.
If the scammers are reasonably intelligent and have put a degree of thought into how to not get caught doing this, they'll introduce multiple layers of abstraction between the physical delivery of $450 bottles of liquor, and the point at which that booze is turned into (gift cards, bitcoin, ethereum, etc) and ultimately in their hands. They're probably calculating on taking at least a 20-35% haircut on the revenue before the somewhat-cleaned-up cryptocurrency or gift cards makes it to them.
Appears likely that someone that has access to the hotel’s customer CC data might be behind this and the local police are aware of it too...
“Not only is this hotel horrible, our guests had their credit card stolen and $500 worth of purchases made on it!!! Reporting this place to the police. Do not even go near this hotel. Total crooks, denied everything when confronted but they were caught red handed” [1]
It's like the 419 emails where they are trying to "recruit a remote working employee in our finance department" where your job is actually to receive fraudulent ACH wire transfers and send the money to some overseas destinations, go to a bitcoin ATM and buy bitcoin to send to the scammer, etc.
If the scammers are reasonably intelligent and have put a degree of thought into how to not get caught doing this, they'll introduce multiple layers of abstraction between the physical delivery of $450 bottles of liquor, and the point at which that booze is turned into (gift cards, bitcoin, ethereum, etc) and ultimately in their hands. They're probably calculating on taking at least a 20-35% haircut on the revenue before the somewhat-cleaned-up cryptocurrency or gift cards makes it to them.