GENESEE COUNTY, MI – Thousands of dollars and more than 100 gift cards were spread evenly across a large table with a black tablecloth on Wednesday, April 6, inside the media room at the Genesee County Sheriff’s Office.
The cash – $100 bills – was fanned out in more than five piles.
Rows of gift cards lined the other end of the table. Each card was loaded with $200, Sheriff’s Lt. David Kennamer said.
The items were among evidence gathered in a Feb. 18 traffic stop that steered authorities onto the trail of a criminal enterprise that they believe has ripped off more than $1 million from businesses across the nation, including a Genesee County Target store that was scammed for nearly $100,000 in just four days.
“What they’re doing is they’re getting these fake credit cards and they go find vulnerable cashiers, people that they can manipulate, people they can prey on, new cashiers that don’t really know the system yet, and they’ll try 100 times until they find one cashier that buys into the scam,” Kennamer said.
The scammers use fake credit cards and convince often-overwhelmed cashiers to run the fake card as cash. Then, they use the money obtained this way to purchase gift cards, making the activity harder to trace.
One person, Shaheem Wright of Flint, is currently charged in connection with the investigation. Wright is charged with single counts each of possession of a fraudulent transaction device and receiving and concealing between $1,000 and $20,000 in stolen property.
If convicted, he could face up to five years in prison.
But authorities believe there are at least seven others involved in the criminal ring, which reaches outside Michigan.
The sheriff didn’t specify whether anyone else had been charged in connection with the criminal ring outside of Michigan.
“When we did the traffic stop on Mr. Wright, it was something that we knew was suspicious,” Swanson said. “We started the investigation and there’s an entire operation that uses this tactic to steal millions and millions of dollars per week from those stores, not only in this community but across the state (and) around the country.”
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