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This is the story of two people in Indiana
who told Amazon its packages kept

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arriving broken, and kept getting
free replacements.

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Nothing was ever broken.

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On September twelfth, two thousand sixteen,
they ordered one smartwatch.

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A Samsung Gear Fit2.

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A hundred and seventy-nine dollars
and ninety-nine cents.

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The next day, before it had even been delivered,
they told Amazon it was damaged.

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Amazon sent a replacement.

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Later that same day, before either package
had arrived, they said the replacement

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was damaged too.

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One paid order.

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Three watches.

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And on the government's own count, they
got more than two thousand one hundred

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free replacements that way.

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The strange part isn't how it started.

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It's that it became what they
did every day, for years.

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Prosecutors had a word for it.

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Their job.

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Amazon's policy, in the government's words,
allowed customers under certain

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circumstances to receive a replacement
before they returned a broken item.

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It's a decent policy.

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It assumes the broken one comes back.

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Theirs never did.

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They kept them, and sold them.

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And the claim came in four shapes.

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Damaged.

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Not working.

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Missing parts.

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And one the filing just
calls, or the like.

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The orders went out under names
that weren't theirs.

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More than seven hundred accounts, a judge
later counted, and not one belonged

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to a real person.

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And the parcels didn't go to their house.

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They went to shipping stores
across Indiana.

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On September sixteenth they walked into one
on East Washington Street in Indianapolis

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and picked up the watches.

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The filing records what they
found there in nine words.

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All of the items were in
good working order.

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Stolen electronics are only worth
something if somebody buys them.

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The court file calls him Individual A.

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Prosecutors named him:

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DAN-yell GLOO-mats of Indianapolis, first
link in a chain ending with a buyer

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in New York.

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He bought from them in person, near-daily
often, prosecutors said, in parking

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lots around Indianapolis.

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And the plea agreement carries five words
that turn a theft into a business.

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They ordered the goods, it says,
as requested by Individual A.

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Xbox One consoles.

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Surface tablets.

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Galaxy Note 10s.

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Gear Fit2 watches.

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GoPro cameras.

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Several hundred dollars each,
and quick to sell.

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So they weren't shoplifters.

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They were suppliers, and somebody
downstream set the week's stock.

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He paid by wire and by check, into accounts
held by companies the two of them

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had invented for the purpose.

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In one twenty-month stretch alone, those
accounts took in about five hundred

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and eighty thousand dollars across more
than two hundred wire transfers.

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A payment every three days.

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Four months before the smartwatches, they
ran the same claim on a batch of

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Xbox One consoles.

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Four hundred and ninety-nine
ninety-nine each.

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On May thirty-first, Individual A wired
one thousand six hundred dollars into

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one of the shell accounts.

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The next day they took a debit card on that
account into a KROH-ger on PEN-dl-ton

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Pike.

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And bought one thousand three hundred and
eighty dollars of Amazon gift cards.

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Then used the gift cards to place
the next round of Amazon orders.

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Look at what that closes.

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Amazon ships.

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The goods are sold.

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The money comes back as a wire.

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The wire buys Amazon credit.

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From here it pays for itself.

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It needs nothing from outside.

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It only needs somebody to keep claiming.

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That supermarket trip is not a detail.

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It is the second crime they
were charged with.

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Money laundering.

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From at least two thousand fourteen to February
second, two thousand seventeen:

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more than two thousand one hundred free replacements,
worth one point two million

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dollars.

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And their own plea agreement
says where the money went.

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The proceeds, it reads, went largely for
routine living expenses, such as meals

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and groceries.

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Not a boat.

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Not a house.

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Groceries.

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Which is the difference between
a heist and a job.

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A heist ends.

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As for the electronics:

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prosecutors said the New York buyer sold
them on to the public often, they

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said, on Amazon.

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The goods went back on the
shelf they came off.

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The whole public account of how they were
caught is one sentence, and it's

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in a press release, not a filing.

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Eventually, however, Amazon and federal
law enforcement caught up with them.

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I-R-S Criminal Investigation worked it,
with the Postal Inspection Service

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and the Indiana State Police.

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How they found them is
nowhere on the record.

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On February second, two thousand seventeen,
they were arrested at a house in

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Brentwood, Tennessee.

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Agents seized ten thousand five hundred
and twenty-eight dollars in cash.

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The Yukon Denali they would forfeit.

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Then something unusual.

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No grand jury ever looked at this case.

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They agreed to skip it and plead mail
fraud, and money laundering.

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On September fourteenth, two thousand
seventeen, ninety minutes apart, both

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of them pleaded guilty in Courtroom 344.

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They had already pleaded guilty.

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Sentencing was months away.

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And they went back to work.

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Six weeks after that courtroom, agents
were back outside a house for a fraud

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they were running while they
waited to be sentenced.

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The judge's own words, later:

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he continued committing fraud
while on pretrial release.

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And of her, that she continued a scheme
similar to the one she'd run against

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Amazon to defraud another
organization for profit.

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On May seventeenth, two thousand eighteen,
Judge TAHN-ya WALL-ton PRATT sentenced

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them.

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Seventy-one months for him.

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Sixty-eight for her.

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GLOO-mats's case did go to a grand jury.

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He was sentenced separately, to two years.

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He was recommended to ASH-land, Kentucky.

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She was recommended to Lexington.

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Ninety miles apart.

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The job had paid them roughly three
quarters of a million dollars.

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It cost them the years you just heard,
and a debt to Amazon of one point two

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million.

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Amazon's policy today reads differently.

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The replacement ships only after
the original goes back.

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The last entry on the docket is December
two thousand twenty-three.

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By then she'd been out since
May of twenty twenty-two.

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Divorced.

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Unemployed since that August.

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Ten restitution payments
in seventeen months.

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She asked to come off supervision
early, and the judge said no.

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Which is how these things usually end.

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Not with a detective.

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With a job that stopped paying,
and a debt that outlived it.