Man charged with making $1.3 million in fraudulent returns to Walmart - Sensationalist Headlines

Man charged with making $1.3 million in fraudulent returns to Wa.. Police in Arizona thought they were busting an ordinary case of a fraudulent return this week until some digging discovered the same 23-year-old man has perpetrated the scheme at thousands of Walmart stores across the country. Police in Yuma, Arizona, said they responded to a case of a fraudulent return on Wednesday afternoon in which a person bringing a computer back to Walmart had allegedly removed parts of the computer before putting it back in the box and taking it back to the store. Thomas Frudaker, 23, was arrested and booked into Yuma County Adult Detention Facility. Yuma police say Frudaker pulled similar schemes at more than 1,000 Walmart stores across the country over the past 18 months and caused a monetary loss of "approximately" $1.3 million to Walmart. Frudaker was charged with six felonies, including two counts of theft, two counts of fraudulent schemes and artifices and two counts of criminal damage. Frudaker is being held at Yuma County Detention Center on $40,000 bond. That sounds like a massive effort.

Having worked retail in the past, it was standard fare for returns of electronics to be checked before they're accepted. The most common was televisions. Those got checked before they left the store and when they come into the store. If the customer broke it because they mishandled it they'd be told to take a hike. Of course it being an electronics store there was a bigger concern with computer components. Notably processors. I had someone try to return an i7 6700K but inside the box was a Pentium N5000. I notified LP and I got a bonus for giving them a tip-off that lead to an arrest. Only reason this guy thought he would (and did for a time) get away with this is general apathy in retail.

how many computers did he do to cost walmart 1.3M$? most of the junk in those computers is worthless, outside of maybe the processor and I've never seen one that had any sort of graphics card or higher tier processor

Walmart calculates the whole product as a loss, not the individual parts. If he was taking a $300 processor out of a $1,500 overpriced HP desktop, the whole desktop is written off and sent back to the manufacturer for repairs, or donated. To rack up over a million bucks, thats alot of desktops.

ya that's fair, I wonder how much he netted though. I've never seen a walmart stock anything remotely expensive in electronics but then most of the walmarts I've been to have been high theft stores

From time to time Walmart has sold 'gaming' PC's, it wouldn't be surprising if one of the things he went after was the GPU, CPU, and memory, the most expensive components in the machine

The walmart I worked at was a high theft store, but the electronics still had $1,500 all-in-one HP machines. Not sure if you can open one of those up and steal parts or not. Like Seris said though, some walmarts stock gaming PCs including $3,000 alienwares.

Most of those things are soldered to the MOBO in mobile systems. Probably just ripped the motherboard to sell as a replacement part (as they're the whole system they usually fetch a few hundred, even aftermarket).

You can get pc's with gtx 1060's and 1070's in them in my walmart. So there is around $300 there.