This is the story of two people in Indiana who told Amazon its packages kept
arriving broken, and kept getting free replacements.
Nothing was ever broken.
On September twelfth, two thousand sixteen, they ordered one smartwatch.
A Samsung Gear Fit2.
A hundred and seventy-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents.
The next day, before it had even been delivered, they told Amazon it was damaged.
Amazon sent a replacement.
Later that same day, before either package had arrived, they said the replacement
was damaged too.
One paid order.
Three watches.
And on the government's own count, they got more than two thousand one hundred
free replacements that way.
The strange part isn't how it started.
It's that it became what they did every day, for years.
Prosecutors had a word for it.
Their job.
Amazon's policy, in the government's words, allowed customers under certain
circumstances to receive a replacement before they returned a broken item.
It's a decent policy.
It assumes the broken one comes back.
Theirs never did.
They kept them, and sold them.
And the claim came in four shapes.
Damaged.
Not working.
Missing parts.
And one the filing just calls, or the like.
The orders went out under names that weren't theirs.
More than seven hundred accounts, a judge later counted, and not one belonged
to a real person.
And the parcels didn't go to their house.
They went to shipping stores across Indiana.
On September sixteenth they walked into one on East Washington Street in Indianapolis
and picked up the watches.
The filing records what they found there in nine words.
All of the items were in good working order.
Stolen electronics are only worth something if somebody buys them.
The court file calls him Individual A.
Prosecutors named him:
DAN-yell GLOO-mats of Indianapolis, first link in a chain ending with a buyer
in New York.
He bought from them in person, near-daily often, prosecutors said, in parking
lots around Indianapolis.
And the plea agreement carries five words that turn a theft into a business.
They ordered the goods, it says, as requested by Individual A.
Xbox One consoles.
Surface tablets.
Galaxy Note 10s.
Gear Fit2 watches.
GoPro cameras.
Several hundred dollars each, and quick to sell.
So they weren't shoplifters.
They were suppliers, and somebody downstream set the week's stock.
He paid by wire and by check, into accounts held by companies the two of them
had invented for the purpose.
In one twenty-month stretch alone, those accounts took in about five hundred
and eighty thousand dollars across more than two hundred wire transfers.
A payment every three days.
Four months before the smartwatches, they ran the same claim on a batch of
Xbox One consoles.
Four hundred and ninety-nine ninety-nine each.
On May thirty-first, Individual A wired one thousand six hundred dollars into
one of the shell accounts.
The next day they took a debit card on that account into a KROH-ger on PEN-dl-ton
Pike.
And bought one thousand three hundred and eighty dollars of Amazon gift cards.
Then used the gift cards to place the next round of Amazon orders.
Look at what that closes.
Amazon ships.
The goods are sold.
The money comes back as a wire.
The wire buys Amazon credit.
From here it pays for itself.
It needs nothing from outside.
It only needs somebody to keep claiming.
That supermarket trip is not a detail.
It is the second crime they were charged with.
Money laundering.
From at least two thousand fourteen to February second, two thousand seventeen:
more than two thousand one hundred free replacements, worth one point two million
dollars.
And their own plea agreement says where the money went.
The proceeds, it reads, went largely for routine living expenses, such as meals
and groceries.
Not a boat.
Not a house.
Groceries.
Which is the difference between a heist and a job.
A heist ends.
As for the electronics:
prosecutors said the New York buyer sold them on to the public often, they
said, on Amazon.
The goods went back on the shelf they came off.
The whole public account of how they were caught is one sentence, and it's
in a press release, not a filing.
Eventually, however, Amazon and federal law enforcement caught up with them.
I-R-S Criminal Investigation worked it, with the Postal Inspection Service
and the Indiana State Police.
How they found them is nowhere on the record.
On February second, two thousand seventeen, they were arrested at a house in
Brentwood, Tennessee.
Agents seized ten thousand five hundred and twenty-eight dollars in cash.
The Yukon Denali they would forfeit.
Then something unusual.
No grand jury ever looked at this case.
They agreed to skip it and plead mail fraud, and money laundering.
On September fourteenth, two thousand seventeen, ninety minutes apart, both
of them pleaded guilty in Courtroom 344.
They had already pleaded guilty.
Sentencing was months away.
And they went back to work.
Six weeks after that courtroom, agents were back outside a house for a fraud
they were running while they waited to be sentenced.
The judge's own words, later:
he continued committing fraud while on pretrial release.
And of her, that she continued a scheme similar to the one she'd run against
Amazon to defraud another organization for profit.
On May seventeenth, two thousand eighteen, Judge TAHN-ya WALL-ton PRATT sentenced
them.
Seventy-one months for him.
Sixty-eight for her.
GLOO-mats's case did go to a grand jury.
He was sentenced separately, to two years.
He was recommended to ASH-land, Kentucky.
She was recommended to Lexington.
Ninety miles apart.
The job had paid them roughly three quarters of a million dollars.
It cost them the years you just heard, and a debt to Amazon of one point two
million.
Amazon's policy today reads differently.
The replacement ships only after the original goes back.
The last entry on the docket is December two thousand twenty-three.
By then she'd been out since May of twenty twenty-two.
Divorced.
Unemployed since that August.
Ten restitution payments in seventeen months.
She asked to come off supervision early, and the judge said no.
Which is how these things usually end.
Not with a detective.
With a job that stopped paying, and a debt that outlived it.