Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Not sure about the Queens location, but the stores here in the city are always full of customers (the Fifth Avenue one does about a million a day). And $2000 is not an unusual amount if you want to buy a Mac for a relative as a gift, but don't know exactly what to give them.

Good that they were able to correlate chargebacks to the employee selling them.

I guess the image Mac Rumors used threw me off. I was thinking of iTunes gift cards. If they were for Apple Stores that seems at least a little more plausible that they would sell a $2,000 one more regularly.
 
Considering he sold $2000 gift cards for only $200, he didn't profit 'that' much. Not living up to his name :)

Sold himself way short. $2000 GCs for $200? At a minimum I would expect to get $1000 each.
Not only that, selling waay below face value should be an instant red flag to most people ;)
 
  • Like
Reactions: PinkDogg
Or as it's called in the UK 'skimmed'....

skimmed is when you COPY the data of the original card from the wire; data from a real card. Skimmers often also observe you while entering the PIN, so they can use cash machines with the cloned card.
 
Not only that, selling waay below face value should be an instant red flag to most people ;)
It said he was working with a partner. I'm guessing he wasn't the mastermind, but he was being paid for his services of "buying" the gift cards for his employer since he had easy access to POS terminals as an employee.

I'm sure whoever ended up selling the actual gift cards sold them at/near face value.
 
How did they not find this out with the sales data within the store? How many $2,000 gift cards do you sell on a regular basis?
I was wondering the exact same thing. Truth is, one of two things got him caught, probably both: Consumers complaining about Fraudulent charges that got tracked back ultimately to the same source, and / or flat our stupidity in this respect: 997K worth of gift cards in a two month span from the same location? That would have flagged him internally if nothing else. Not just a thief, but a really stupid one. Its hard to tell somewhat if he really did all of that in two months the way the article is worded, but that's the way it reads to me.
 
Amazing how so much evil goes undetected for so long.

VW's diesel fixing went undetected for years. Makes you realise it's a big, bad world.

"So much evil"? He frauded Apple out of $997K and netted $99.7K for himself in the process. In the grand scheme of things, that doesn't seem like much evil to me. Nobody died. Nobody was hurt. No individual lost money. Apple has so much money that it's a minor inconvenience for them to lose that $1M.

"Undetected for so long"? He lasted from August to October - potentially as little as one month (if it was from the end of August to the start of October) or as many as three (start of August to end of October). Neither of those strike me as lasting particularly long.

I'm not going to praise this man or anything - he was a criminal, plain and simple, but it seems like everyone is saying this guy is a lot worse than he is. He stole a bit of money from a corporation. Nobody was threatened with bodily harm. Nobody was harmed. Nobody was robbed. I'd say somebody pointing a knife at a cashier and demanding everything in the drawer, although being a smaller amount of money stolen, is a good deal worse than this guy.

Throwing him in prison for 15 years seems like a waste of a life and potential. If he was able to do this as a criminal, maybe he has some useful skills that he could apply for legitimate good? Give him a year or two in prison.
 
And Apple employees complaining about bag searches. It wouldn't have caught this guy but, the guy's actions show that the Apple stores have to keep an eye on it's employees.
Steve Jobs never discovered Umpa Loompas to run his company.
 
"So much evil"? He frauded Apple out of $997K and netted $99.7K for himself in the process. In the grand scheme of things, that doesn't seem like much evil to me. Nobody died. Nobody was hurt. No individual lost money. Apple has so much money that it's a minor inconvenience for them to lose that $1M.

"Undetected for so long"? He lasted from August to October - potentially as little as one month (if it was from the end of August to the start of October) or as many as three (start of August to end of October). Neither of those strike me as lasting particularly long.

I'm not going to praise this man or anything - he was a criminal, plain and simple, but it seems like everyone is saying this guy is a lot worse than he is. He stole a bit of money from a corporation. Nobody was threatened with bodily harm. Nobody was harmed. Nobody was robbed. I'd say somebody pointing a knife at a cashier and demanding everything in the drawer, although being a smaller amount of money stolen, is a good deal worse than this guy.

Throwing him in prison for 15 years seems like a waste of a life and potential. If he was able to do this as a criminal, maybe he has some useful skills that he could apply for legitimate good? Give him a year or two in prison.

He recoded gift cards with stolen credit card information. I'm sure most people were able to get the charges reversed, but still, he stole from individual people. I'd be pretty pissed if someone stole my credit card information and bought $2,000 gift cards with it.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Benjamin Frost
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.