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Quebec Man Charged in a Federal Court in Louisiana with Offering to Sell More Than 500,000 Stolen Gift Card Account Numbers

Louisiana – On May 17, 2022, the United States Attorney’s Office announced that a federal grand jury recently returned a six-count indictment charging Richard Verret, age 40, of Quebec, Canada, with unauthorized solicitation of access devices and trafficking counterfeit access devices, the result of a multi-year investigation into Verret’s online criminal activity.

On March 22, 2022, the indictment was filed under seal in Baton Rouge. Verret was arrested at Orlando International Airport on April 7, 2022, after arriving in the United States from Canada. Verret appeared in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida on April 8, 2022, and the court ordered him to remain in federal custody pending his appearance in the Middle District of Louisiana. Verret made his first appearance in this district on May 16, 2022, and he is still in custody.

Verret, also known as “Luxury187,” “Miami24k,” and other screen names, operated and controlled several websites, including the “Lux Giftcards Shop” and “Miami’s Gift Card Shop,” through which he advertised the sale of gift cards for major restaurant chains, grocery stores, entertainment venues, and other retail business chains (collectively, the “businesses”). Many of the businesses that advertised gift cards on Verret’s websites had locations throughout Louisiana.

The indictment also claims that Verret obtained a large number of valid gift card account numbers through deception and theft. Verret and others could access the account balances and spend the funds without ever having actual, physical possession of the original, legitimate gift cards because the account numbers could be loaded into mobile applications and scanned at store registers, used for online purchases, and/or re-programmed onto blank access devices. Verret would sell the account numbers over the internet at steep discounts, using various methods to conceal his identity and avoid detection.

According to the indictment, Verret’s websites advertised that they offered gift cards to hundreds of different businesses and that more gift cards were being added “every week.” One of the websites offered over 550,000 gift cards to over 500 different businesses as of late February 2022. The total stored value of all fraudulently obtained accounts offered for sale exceeded $22 million.

In this case, the US has seized two domain names used by Verret in furtherance of his criminal activity, “www.miami24k.com” and “www.miami.gift.” Federal law enforcement officials recently served the domain registrars with federal seizure warrants, instructing the registrars to lock the domain names and display a banner notifying users that the domains have been temporarily seized pending further proceedings.

The US Department of Homeland Security and the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office are investigating, and the investigation has received significant assistance from the US Department of Justice’s Office of International Affairs, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the Quebec Police Department. Assistant United States Attorneys Alan A. Stevens, who also serves as Senior Litigation Counsel, and Brad Casey are prosecuting the case.

An indictment is an accusation by a grand jury. The defendant is presumed innocent until and unless adjudicated guilty at trial or through a guilty plea.

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