An Apple Store employee was arrested and charged with a number of crimes, including grand larceny, after an internal investigation. The employee has been accused of using re-coded credit and debit cards for purchasing gift cards worth $997,000.
Alleged fraudster a trusted Apple employee
NBC Channel 4 News informed viewers that Ruben Profit, the accused, chose Apple’s Queens Center Mall location for conducting his illegal operation where he allegedly loaded up multiple Apple gift cards making use of Visa and American Express gift, debit and pre-paid cards. Profit then admitted to selling them to a third party, which is unidentified for now, at heavily discounted rates.
Since December 2013, Profit has been working with Apple as a retail employee. The company caught wind of the scheme only after it began receiving charge-backs on the fraudulent gift cards allegedly circulated by Profit. The investigation started sometime in this month.
“The defendant is accused of using his tech skills to rig the values on both American Express and Visa gift cards and then using them to purchase gift cards from his employer — The Apple Store,” Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said. Profit was a trusted employee of the company and worked both as a salesperson and as tech support, the attorney said.
Profit faces several charges
Profit has several charges against him: second-degree grand larceny, first-degree criminal possession of a forged instrument and third-degree criminal possession of stolen property. The fraudster confessed that for each $2,000 Apple gift card, he got $200 in return. At the time of arrest, Profit reportedly had seven Apple gift cads worth $2,000 each in his possession. He also had 51 Visa and American Express gift cards that were re-encoded with credit card information.
From where Profit obtained the valid credit card information to be encoded onto the fake cards is not very clear for now, but similar tricksters in the U.S. make use of stolen data posted to the so-called “Dark Web.”
Profit could be sentenced to prison for 15 years if convicted, the report said. He was arraigned Friday and is being held on $20,000 bail. Whether he had an attorney or not was not clear immediately. Profit will appear in court next on Nov. 10 as per the schedule.
