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WSAZ-TV reports six people were booked in Maricopa County over a scheme using hacked Walmart accounts to order $1.23 million in goods for export.
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WSAZ-TVSix people have been arrested in Arizona over a $1.23 million fraud scheme that used hacked Walmart accounts and stolen card numbers to order thousands of packages, according to WSAZ-TV. The case stretched from drop houses in the Phoenix area to shipping containers bound for Vietnam.
The arrests matter because of how the case started. A Walmart delivery driver told Peoria police on August 22 that he had dropped 30 to 50 packages under different names at the same house in just a couple of days. A separate customer report, that their Walmart account had been hacked and used to buy items, landed around the same time. Those two reports, filed independently by a driver and a shopper, gave investigators the thread that unravelled a scheme running at industrial scale.
Court documents describe about 15,500 orders placed on Walmart.com using hacked accounts and stolen credit and debit card numbers. Delivery addresses were altered to dodge fraud alerts built to catch exactly that kind of pattern. Police linked 11,364 of those orders, worth more than $768,000, to six drop houses in Mesa, Avondale, Glendale and Peoria.
The merchandise, described as the kind of everyday goods any household might order, shampoo, lotion, Fixodent, bags of M&M's, was funneled through two boba shops in Peoria and Tolleson before being driven to California. From there it was shipped to Vietnam in containers through a company called U.S. Cargo Shipping LLC.
Investigators say the operation was organized by 30-year-old Hoài Nguyen Nguyen, who is believed to own U.S. Cargo Shipping LLC. He told police he was only an employee there and denied involvement in the fraud. Two other suspects told investigators Nguyen recruited them to receive packages under false names, track them, and load them for the drive to California, in exchange for a cut of the shipment's value.
Search warrants were served across the Phoenix valley with help from SWAT teams, Homeland Security Investigations and Walmart's own investigators. Ten people were detained; four were released without charge. Six were booked into Maricopa County Jail on charges including fraud, identity theft, computer tampering and trafficking in stolen property: Thien Tran, 42; Uy Vu Phan, 55; Minh Ngọc Nguyen, 57; and Hie Xuan Le, 24, among others.
Police recovered about $25,000 worth of Walmart merchandise, along with $35,000 in cash and $45,000 in gold bars. Walmart has so far confirmed $57,501 in chargeback losses tied to two victims. JPMorgan Chase has confirmed 203 customers affected, totaling $8,821 in unauthorized purchases.
What this changes for a Walmart customer is simple: a hacked account is not a hypothetical risk, it is the entry point this entire scheme ran through, and the case shows that both a retailer's own fraud team and an ordinary customer's complaint can be the thing that breaks a ring this size open.
