How a gift card scam from Naples ripped off innocent customers

According to the Naples Police Department, two individuals may have defrauded numerous people if officers had not arrested them when they did.

The method involved transferring gift cards and fake barcodes to a criminal’s bank account, according to police

Kirils Gula and Maksims Slapins, both 26 years old and Latvian nationals, were detained.

Investigators said that the males would steal gift cards, put a phony bar code on them, and then return them to the shelves where they had been removed.

Additionally, investigators stated that if a customer purchased and scanned the bar code to activate it, the gift card would be routed to a crime syndicate’s bank account instead.

The officers caught the suspects by simply being in the right place at the right time.

Police say a detective found Gula and Slapins acting suspiciously at a Walgreens on Jan. 29. They said the pair was at a gift card rack, trying to conceal something.

Then, the detective said they went to a Publix and another Walgreens but didn’t buy anything.

The detective followed them the whole time and pulled the pair over because of expired tags.

Gula, police say, told them he was in the United States for 30 days and didn’t have a driver’s license yet. However, the detective found out Gula was here for four months and had a Latvian passport.