Alleged robbery suspect shot by victim during meetup for social media content in Champions Point<\/a><\/p>\nInside the investigation<\/p>\n
Law enforcement first got alerted about the group because of suspicious activity noticed at the gift card kiosk at a Walgreens in Spring, according to investigators. One of the suspects spent about 15 minutes hanging out around the cards, before employees noticed 15 altered gift cards.<\/p>\n
The group then got tracked by law enforcement to stores around the Houston area, each day hitting an estimated 20 locations, and each time stealing gift cards off the shelves.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis gift card tampering is kind of an epidemic at this point,\u201d said Lt. Scott Hamilton with the Texas FCIC.<\/p>\n
Law enforcement learned the suspects rented a car in Austin before driving to Houston, where they are believed to have rented rooms at a home in southwest Houston. It served as a homebase for the operation, according to Hamilton.<\/p>\n
Investigators served a search warrant at that home, recovering reusable bags full of bundles of more than 8,000 of gift cards from different retailers, stuffed inside a closet.<\/p>\n
As Hamilton\u2019s team built the case locally, the crew moved to the Austin area, where they began operating out of a hotel room, targeting dozens of stores around Austin.<\/p>\n
Austin-area arrests<\/p>\n
While working from sun up to sun down as if it was a full-time job, as Hamilton put it, two of the suspects got arrested in Buda, Texas.<\/p>\n
Photos shared with KPRC 2 News show one of the suspects, Houjie Lin, with a pocket full of gift cards.<\/p>\n
Yi-Hsun Wu also got arrested at that time at a Walgreens, and investigators found dozens of tampered gift cards along with a glove box full of rubber bands during a search of their vehicle.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey got up in the morning and they went and they stole cards all day long and went to the house and started back up the next day,\u201d Hamilton said.<\/p>\n
Investigators also served a search warrant at the Austin hotel room, where they recovered thousands more gift cards, and found Hsai Lin \u201cactively processing and dismantling gift cards.\u201d<\/p>\n
All three have now been charged in Hays County with first-degree engaging in organized crime, higher charges compared to their initial arrests. The Lins are wanted, Hamilton said, while Wu has been taken into immigration custody and is expected to be deported.<\/p>\n
The bigger impact<\/p>\n
The nearly 12,000 gift cards had a total value of nearly $5.7 million, and investigators believed the trio was working to capture numerical information from each gift card that would have been put into their own database.<\/p>\n
The cards would then be returned to the store shelves where they came from, Hamilton said, and when purchased by an unsuspecting customer, the suspects would receive notice about a balance being available.<\/p>\n
They\u2019d then be able to access and drain those funds, Hamilton said, sometimes before a customer even got home from purchasing the gift card.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce that card becomes activated, they get notification, and if they\u2019re on their computer at the time, they could have spent the $500 that you paid for before you got to the house,\u201d Hamilton said. \u201cRealistically, that\u2019s 12,00 people that would have bought a gift card and came up empty so luckily we were able to stop that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Protecting yourself<\/p>\n
To avoid getting a tampered with gift card, Hamilton said customers should pay close attention to any packaging that appears to be altered.<\/p>\n
He suggested getting a gift card that\u2019s not at the front of a shelf, or isn\u2019t at eye level, and reporting any potential tampering to a store clerk.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes it\u2019s obvious, sometimes it\u2019s not,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 by KPRC Click2Houston – All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HOUSTON \u2013 Three people are facing first-degree felony charges in Hays County, Texas, after allegedly stealing thousands of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":270506,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[132,294,8374,36097,56,58,57,66,223,5502],"class_list":["post-270505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-austin","tag-crime","tag-fraud","tag-gift-cards","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news","tag-local","tag-news","tag-theft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270505\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}