Major Retail Fraud Ring Hits Best Buy, Home Depot, Macy's

Eight thieves were arrested for their involvement in a major Cleveland-based retail fraud ring for conspiracy to commit wire fraud at Lowe's, Home Depot, Staples, Best Buy, hhgregg, Macy's, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Sears.

Individuals involved in the large-scale retail fraud scheme utilized "private label" credit card accounts which are accounts offered to consumers specific to a particular retail chain and are backed by independent financial institutions.

In this scheme, these individuals conspired together to contact creditor customer service departments and utilized a variety of tactics to obtain legitimate and active credit account information. This information was used to defraud employees of these customer service departments into adding an authorized user to an account, or change the account holder information to reflect that of individuals that were part of this conspiracy who would act as "runners."

After these "runners" were added as an authorized user, the "runner" along with one or two associates would then go to a victim retailer and request that a store employee look-up their account from personal identifiers that were obtained from the scheme. At times, the "runners" had to show their valid ID or recite the last four digits of the account holder's social security number as proof they were authorized to use the account. The "runners" would then purchase items and charge them to the account. The individuals involved in this conspiracy had customers who would then purchase these items from them.

The victims of this scheme are the independent financial institutions who believe that they have suffered losses of approximately $500,000 to $1,000,000.