A fraud suspect spotted two years ago inside a Jacksonville Beach Target has been charged with gift-card tampering after investigators tracked his travel to stores up and down Florida’s coastline.
Zhenjun Wei could face up to 10 years behind bars if he’s convicted on a July 16 indictment issued after an investigator described Wei stealing cards at a string of Targets, running them through a card reader and putting them back on store racks.
The card reader helps a thief record a card’s bar code and security information to use the card’s buying power once a customer pays for it and it’s activated.
Wei is scheduled to answer the charges at a July 24 arraignment in Jacksonville’s federal court.
Wei was thought to be one of three men spotted tampering with gift cards at the Jacksonville Beach Target in May 2023, according to a criminal complaint.
The complaint said another of the men was arrested at a Target in Northern Virginia in December 2024 and that the retailer’s cyber-fraud unit told a Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office detective in June that Wei was back in Florida.
The detective, part of a U.S. Department of Homeland Security task force, tracked Wei to a hotel in Palm Bay in Brevard County and set up surveillance that followed his car July 1 to eight Targets between there and Palm Coast, about 120 miles away, the complaint said.
After entering each store, Wei would spend 30 minutes to an hour in his car, “where he would tamper with the cards … with a card reader attached to his laptop,” then go back to the store and return the cards, the complaint said.
After visiting stores in Palm Bay, Melbourne, Vierra, Merritt Island, Titusville, Port Orange and Daytona Beach, Wei was arrested around 7 p.m. walking back towards a Target in Palm Coast with 47 gift cards in his pockets, the complaint said.
Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch said in March that it “specifically targets Chinese organized crime groups due to the cross-border nature of the crime.”
Gift card fraud involving Chinese crime groups “is spreading across the globe and can be attributed to losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars,” ICE said in a release about an anti-fraud effort called Project Red Hook.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Surveillance at Targets over 120 miles leads to gift-card fraud charge in Jacksonville
Reporting by Steve Patterson, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union / Florida Times-Union
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
