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Apple Store Employee Charged With Stealing Nearly $1 Million in Apple Gift Cards
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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
Not only that, selling waay below face value should be an instant red flag to most people
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.
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.Not only that, selling waay below face value should be an instant red flag to most people
I'm sure whoever ended up selling the actual gift cards sold them at/near face value.
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.
So long? Just a couple of months have passed...and we don't know how long they knew and were watching him.
Well, you can't say he never lived up to his name.
$1m is an extortionate amount to steal, especially in 1-3 months.
$1m is an extortionate amount to steal, especially in 1-3 months.
"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.
Maybe he could be sentenced to 15 years at Foxconn instead, he could learn a new language, culture and everything.
Plus the meaning of actual work and the threat of death for being a thief. Might put things into perspective.
There were skimmers operating in our office a few years back... taking payments and all the digits and then producing the cards. They got caught too...
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.