20 Years in Prison for ‘Discounted’ Printers at Staples
Staples was cheated out of more than a hundred thousand dollars, and the men who initially pulled it off are now paying the price.
A man from Loveland, Ohio was found by a federal jury to be guilty of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The conviction was actually the result of the participation of the accused – Paul Shumbayaonda – in a scam that enabled him to purchase cameras, printers and computers from Staples for next to nothing, thanks to a friend who worked as a customer service representative at a Staples call center.
Shumbayaonda and his accomplices, Huyaimuzoona Bere and Bekizulu Mhlanga, reportedly made quite a bit of money out of Bere’s position in the call center. The scam worked by the placement of orders through the internet by Shumbayaonda and Mhlanga of low-priced items like ink cartridges and computer disks using their personal credit cards.
Bere will then access these orders and add expensive items, such as a computer, cameras and printers worth a thousand to a couple thousand dollars or so, bring the total bill to almost $5,000. He will then award heavy discounts to the order, to the point where Mhlanga or Shumbayaonda will be charged as little as less than a dollar for these expensive items.
How Bere was able to do this was not discussed in detail, but it certainly is surprising to us. These customer service screens are normally equipped with controls that will deter the giving of huge discounts by the CSR alone; such additional transactions would normally entail the approval code of a supervisor.
At any rate, Shumbayaonda and Mhlanga predictably either resold the items that they received on eBay, used it themselves or gave them to Bere. They reportedly did the scheme a total of 8 times and were able to con Staples out of $118,492 worth of items.
The three men reportedly face 20 years in prison.
Tags: online purchase fraud, online purchase scam, printer scam, staples online storeRelated posts
(4 votes, average: 3.50 out of 5)
Loading ...Posted by PrintFriendly on December 5th, 2009
January 18, 2010 @ 3:18 pm
I was suprised to read about this atticle. I know two of these guys and they are very good, educated people and they have helped me personally.
I had to do research on my own to find out what happened and I was suprised to even find out that they was a system glitch which they took advantage of. I am not sure what happened but it looks like they are being charged for taking advantage of this glitch and some court documents even mention this issue. I am not sure about how our legal system works but I think, since these guys a foreigners they were scared and they didn’t have resources to fight this case. How can it be theft when the items were bought at a certain price. These items were shipped legally and they passed all security checks.
If I had money I was going to try to fight this case for these guys. Thus not like them.