2 Philadelphia men charged in $5.8M extortion scam
The caller to the New Jersey retail store said there was a bomb.
And if the store manager didn't follow the demands of the person on the other end of the phone -- loading up 10 prepaid card with $500 each -- it would be detonated.
Calls like that are how two Philadelphia men extorted $5.8 million from victims by scamming them into putting money on reloadable debit cards, then depositing the funds into bank accounts, according to federal prosecutors.
Alpeshkumar Patel, 30, and Vijaykumar Patel, 39, have been charged in federal court in New Jersey with conspiracy to commit wire fraud for their alleged roles in the extortion scam, which took place between September 2013 and March.
Court documents say the two, who are not related, and other conspirators would buy reloadable debit cards called Green Dot cards and register them in names other than their own.
Those conspirators would then contact the victims by phone and threaten or deceive the victims in order to get them to put money on cards called MoneyPak cards, which are used with a PIN code to add funds to the Green Dot cards, prosecutors said.
They then used the cards to buy money orders and deposited the funds into bank accounts.
"All of this is done quickly and before law enforcement or the victims can identify the conspirators or reverse the fraudulent transfers to the prepaid debit cards," the criminal complaint says.
In total, the conspirators have been tied to about 2,500 Green Dot cards with more than $5.8 million in funding, prosecutors said.
In one case, a New Jersey retail store received a phone call from someone who said there was a bomb in the store and the explosive would detonate if the manager didn't comply with the caller's demands, according to court documents. The caller told the manager to load 10 $500 MoneyPaks and give the caller the PIN codes.
The manager gave the code for one $500 MoneyPak to the caller before hanging up the phone when law enforcement arrived. Those MoneyPak funds were transferred to a Green Dot Card, which had been purchased earlier that day at a CVS in Philadelphia, court documents say.
Surveillance video shows Alpeshkumar Patel in the CVS at that time, the documents say.
Other surveillance footage allegedly shows Vijaykumar Patel using the Green Dot card to buy money orders.
Other retail stores received similar calls, court records say, and the two defendants were seen at numerous stores where the Green Dot cards associated with the scam were purchased and were used to buy money orders.
The pair's phones also show "hundreds if not thousands" of communications about Green Dot cards, money orders, and depositing money orders into bank accounts, court documents said.