More than 500 iPhones were seized in the US this week, with police in Tigard, Washington, uncovering a group of criminals who trafficked the terminals iPhone in China using gift cards bought with stolen credit cards.
Tigard detectives discovered, by mistake, in a mall a man with a large number of gift cards buying products Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), a Apple Store, making the decision to follow him and ask the local police to stop and search his car after noticing that it was full of recently purchased Apple products.
During the search of the car, the police discovered over 470 iPhone terminals inside it alone, the man offering them after hearings and information that helped the police confiscate several dozen more terminals from a headquarters of the Fed Ex courier company.
The accused agreed to cooperate with the police in order to identify other people who are part of this organized criminal group, their purpose being to buy iPhone terminals which are then sent to Hong Kong where they are sold with a fairly large profit.
Police said that detectives seized more than 470 Apple iPhones from the car, worth more than $290,000, along with hundreds of gift cards worth more than $585,000. The alleged thieves directed Tigard detectives to a nearby Fed Ex store, where police seized dozens of boxes of iPhones bound for Hong Kong.
The more than 500 iPhones are worth more than 300.000 dollars, but along with them gift cards worth 585.000 dollars were also discovered, so we are talking about a very large damage caused to the people whose credit cards were cloned.
For now, the police do not say if any Apple employee was involved in this group, considering that most of the iPhones were bought from two Apple Stores, but we are talking about an impressive capture that still reveals a small part of how traffics in iPhones all over the world.
