$6 MILLION Home Depot 'gift card' scam

[Melensdad]

I don't understand why Home Depot didn't catch this sooner!

The Gift That Keeps On Giving: Man Charged in $6M Home Depot Scam

Officials charged a fourth suspect in a fraud scam that caused Home Depot stores in Chicago to lose millions of dollars.

www.breitbart.com

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The Gift That Keeps On Giving: Chicago Man Charged in Years Long $6M Home Depot Scam​

Amy Furr28 Jul 2023​

Chicago Police Departmentnone​

4:00​

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Officials have charged a fourth suspect in a fraud scam that caused Home Depot stores in Chicago to lose a massive chunk of money.​

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In an article published Thursday, CWB Chicago said it reported in May the stores were defrauded by several individuals who racked up $900 credits over 6,000 times for one purchase a few years prior:​

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Officials said the scam began in March 2020 when someone purchased more than $6,000 from the home improvement chain’s 2570 North Elston location. Days later, someone returned to the store and said the purchase was for a tax-exempt church. A store employee accepted the tax-exempt documents and issued the representative a $900 gift card for the tax value.​

Taxes on the purchase were $555, and that receipt was recycled for three years to make over 6,000 gift cards. Many of those cards had $900 on them.​

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“Cashiers scanned the receipt bar code from an accomplice’s phone each time, manually entered the tax exemption information, and then cut a gift card for the difference,” the report continued, noting some of the cashiers made several gift cards for the same purchase at one time, and some had a copy of the receipt saved on their phones to use.​

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Now, prosecutors allege a man identified as 25-year-old Tyler Clark took part in the scheme when he was a cashier at one of the store’s locations on South Western.​

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He is accused of making $900 gift cards for the 2020 purchase over 900 times, an act that allegedly drained the company of $873,900.​

Now, the charges against him are continuing financial crimes enterprise and theft of $500,000 to $1 million. However, he was released on his own recognizance Thursday, per Judge David Kelly.​

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Authorities initially estimated the company was drained of $5.5 million in the scam, however, the number has since been updated to approximately $6 million, the CWB Chicago report said.​

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The outlet also named 49-year-old Lamont Thompson as one of the “customers” in the case, along with two Home Depot cashiers identified as 38-year-old Christiana Westbrooks, and 46-year-old Sharon Dwyer.​

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Although the three suspects were eventually charged in the case, they were freed on their own recognizance. In addition, the CWB report noted that how the scam was able to continue unnoticed for three years remained a mystery.​

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“Just keep going until you get caught because eventually they will catch up with you,” one social media user commented on the story, while another said, “If he was a politician, he would have gotten away with it,” when speaking of Clark.

. . . .STORY CONTINUES AT LINK ABOVE​

 

[power1]

Pretty easy to see how they did not catch it. They didn't want to catch it. The employees were in on the deal or were too stupid to realize what was going on. Either way it is hard to understand why they were employees in the first place.