Six people were arrested following a large retail theft and fraud ring bust in Santa Clara County, the sheriff’s office said Thursday. <\/p>\n
The sheriff’s office reports 23-year-old Thanh Vo of San Jose, 37-year-old Corey Guting of Milpitas, 45-year-old Erik Nguyen of San Jose, 37-year-old Ye Zhang of Monterey Park, 25-year-old De Lu, and 32-year-old Yan Wong of Campbell were arrested on suspicion of organized retail theft, financial elder abuse, theft by false pretenses, possession of stolen property and conspiracy.<\/p>\n
According to sheriff’s officials, the “organized retail theft and fraud enterprise” was responsible for trafficking in millions of dollars’ worth of stolen goods and exploiting older victims across the country to do it. <\/p>\n
The investigation began in June, when detectives started tracking retail theft, authorities said. <\/p>\n
On Tuesday, officials said five coordinated search warrants at homes, storage units and a warehouse in San Jose and Campbell were executed. These locations were used as storage, drop-off, and distribution centers for stolen merchandise, according to authorities.<\/p>\n
The sheriff’s office reports investigators recovered more than a dozen box truckloads of Home Depot merchandise at a home on Banana Grove Lane, with an estimated value exceeding $1 million. <\/p>\n
Investigators also found 100 totes filled with bottles of wine, many of which were believed to have been stolen and were returned to Target, officials said.<\/p>\n
Additionally, sheriff officials report detectives uncovered a nationwide fraud scheme targeting hundreds of victims, many of them older citizens, through online and phone scams. Victims were coerced into purchasing high-value gift cards, often from Home Depot and Lowe’s and providing the card information to the scammers, the sheriff’s office reports.<\/p>\n
Investigators estimate more than $10,000 in fraudulent gift card purchases occurred each day at Bay Area retail locations for several months, according to authorities.<\/p>\n
Retailers including Home Depot, Target, Lowe’s and Sports are inventorying the recovered property, and much of it is expected to be returned, officials said.<\/p>\n
The Santa Clara Sheriff’s Office said it is believed that more victims may be connected to the scheme, and ask anyone who believes they may have been a victim to contact investigators at ORT@shf.sccgov.org.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Six people were arrested following a large retail theft and fraud ring bust in Santa Clara County, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20335,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[88,90,89,198],"class_list":{"0":"post-20334","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-jose","8":"tag-san-jose","9":"tag-san-jose-headlines","10":"tag-san-jose-news","11":"tag-santa-clara-county"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20334\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}