Thankfully most criminals are not that bright. Article in the Arizona Republic this morning about a group of three Mexican nationals who were on a little shopping spree in the Valley of the Sun. The trio was going to various electronic retailers and making purchased with fake credit cards. The cards appeared to be legitimate card stock from legitimate Mexican banks, but account numbers from valid U.S. accounts.
The trouble starts when they buy a laptop from a WalMart, going out to the car, only to find that the laptop was missing. The WalMart employees legitimately messed up, and the box they provided the ‘customers’ was empty, and no one seemed to notice until after the group left the store.
In what I assume was an unintentional remake of the classic scene ‘Somebody ripped off the thing I ripped off’, they got mad and went back to the store to complain. Loudly. To the point where the WalMart employees called the cops, panic ensued, with the three running out of the store flinging bogus credit cards around the parking lot … allegedly. Reports of their yelling ‘Whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop’ have not been independently confirmed. The three men were arrested and are being held on forgery and fraud charges pending an investigation.
The real question in my mind will be where did the valid credit card account numbers originate from and who provided them. They were stolen from somewhere, and if the crooks had 19 cards made up, that should be enough to provide a statistically meaningful sample to match up with a point of origin. We have seen a lot of credit card number theft over the past several years, which tend to be highly publicized. We see much less on the use/fraud side. I am going to be interested to see what the police uncover … if it makes the news that is.
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