Darwin Alberto Corea Calderon was sentenced this week for a three-year scheme that drained more than $464,000 from Home Depot stores across the Carolinas. The mechanism was smaller than a Ponzi and older than the self-checkout aisle.
A former Chick-fil-A employee in Grapevine, Texas allegedly walked back behind the counter after his termination and ran 800 fake mac and cheese orders through the register, refunding each one to his own credit cards. The machine that let him do it was not a hack. It was a door that nobody thought to close.
A group called RBK built a working business out of Amazon's customer service window, charging clients 15 to 30 percent to file fraudulent refund claims on high-value electronics and keeping the goods. The machine ran for over two years before Amazon sued. The eleven people sentenced last week for a parallel operation suggest this was never a small problem.