PLANO - An unsuspecting customer buys a gift card for a family member. But when he or she goes to use the card, it's already spent.
It's a crime we first told you about earlier this month. It happened over and over again at the Plano Walmart, just off Central Expressway and Spring Creek Parkway.
Plano Police say they found the culprit.
Karie Anderegg went to Walmart to buy three $100 gift cards for her son in Ohio. When he tried to use them, the balance was just $1.96.
"They're in packages," Anderegg said. "I thought they were safe. Obviously, they weren't."
An investigation led police to a Plano motel, where they found 30-year-old Jonathan Boatman. They say Boatman confessed, telling officers he would steal gift cards from Walmart and take them to his motel room.
There, he would record the 16-digit numbers on the card, use a razor blade to read the secret pin number and then return the cards to Walmart. When a customer would buy gift cards and load them with money, Boatman would know.
"He would then contact the 800 number that's on the back of the card and see if any balance had been added to it," said Plano police spokesman David Tilley. "If not, try that card number again later."
Detectives say if there was money on the card, Boatman would go to Walmart's web site, where he would buy items and pick them up at the store.
Police found incriminating evidence inside the motel room, including computer equipment, a magnetic strip card reader, blank magnetic strip cards and altered Walmart receipts.
They believe Boatman was also cloning cards, by transferring numbers on authentic cards to counterfeit ones.
"He was able to take a device and actually record the bar code off it and load it onto another card, where he could actually go into the store and utilize his own, for the most part, his own homemade card," Tilley said.
Plano police say they're not sure at this point how many times Boatman committed the gift card crimes. But they told us, with the suspect cooperating, they expect to solve cases in Plano and likely other North Texas cities.
E-mail sstoler@wfaa.com
