Payment processors aren’t idiots, and a huge number of new charges was likely to arouse suspicion. (Indeed, one processor suspected that Tech Live Connect was using “friendly” charges as early as 2018.) To make the charges look legitimate, Tech Live Connect processed them using real customer data, including names and addresses.

Once Tech Live Connect got its chargeback ratio low enough, it used this data to get more merchant accounts, allowing it to stay in business longer and for people there to scam new targets. Cotter eventually admitted that, by keeping his company open using this scheme, he defrauded Americans of an additional $8 million or so.

The scheme ran for four years, and it had to be managed every month. In March 2018, for instance, Cotter’s team realized that it needed 27,000 more “good” transactions that month to outweigh all the bad ones, so it spent $140,000 to acquire 3,000 virtual debit cards, which it then charged through six different payment gateways.

For a plan that involved giving money to yourself, this one proved surprisingly costly. By the time Tech Live Connect acquired the cards in bulk, which required third-party vendors, and then paid all processing charges, half of the money charged was gone.

Still, it was worth a few million dollars to keep the company in business. Tech Live Connect made significant cash—more than $13 million during the four years this system was in operation.

Payment processors grew suspicious despite Cotter’s tricks, and by 2020 the US Postal Inspection Service had launched an investigation. Cotter was charged later that year and by December 2020 had been hit with an injunction ordering him to stop “selling technical-support services or software via telemarketing or websites.”

The legal case dragged on for years, until Cotter finally pleaded guilty in January 2026 to one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud. Last week, the 64-year-old Cotter was sentenced to 28 months in prison.