Chinese gang nailed in huge WalMart gift cards scam

by Craig Silverman and Peter Elkind

This article was originallly published by ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. It is republished with permission.

Christy Browne was in a panic. The man on the phone said he was from the FBI. He warned her that drug traffickers had obtained her Social Security number and were using it to launder money. He said the FBI needed money to catch them.

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“They told me not to go to local law enforcement,” Browne testified in court recently about the February 2020 call. The police were watching her and considered her a suspect, the man said.

At his direction, Browne, a retired elementary school teacher who lives in upstate New York, bought four $500 Walmart gift cards at her local Walmart. It was 3:15 pm. She took photos of the serial numbers and PINs on the back and texted them to the man on the phone. With that information, the fraudster had access to $2,000.

That was only the first step. The gift card numbers were then sold to Qinbin Chen, a Chinese national living in Virginia. At 5:47 pm, Chen passed the numbers to a co-conspirator waiting near a Walmart in Sterling, Virginia.

Just eight minutes later, at 5:55, the accomplice did something that an ordinary consumer would rarely do, but which is routine for fraudsters: use one gift card to buy another. With the numbers from Browne’s Walmart cards, he purchased Apple, Google Play and other gift cards at the store’s self-checkout kiosk. He sent the serial numbers and PINs for those cards to Chen, who then sold them to a buyer in China. Transferring the money to other companies’ gift cards for use in another country made it