BROOKLYN, NY \u2014 A five-count indictment was unsealed in federal court this week charging five New York City people in connection with a more than two-year scheme to fraudulently acquire and resell over $20 million in building and construction materials, and appliances from home improvement and hardware stores throughout Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, and elsewhere, the U.S. Attorney’s office said. <\/p>\n
Named in the indictment were Kai Xu, 44; Xiang Chen, 39; Songhak Lee, 35; and Kang Zhang, 30, all of Queens, and Zhi Bin An, 56, of Brooklyn, who were slapped with varying charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, bank fraud, money laundering, and bank fraud, as well as access device fraud, according to the office.<\/p>\n
Xu is represented by a federal defender, court records show.<\/p>\n
Defense attorney information for Chen, Zhang, Lee, and An was not immediately available.<\/p>\n
U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella said that “the tools of their trade were not hammers and nails, but fraud and deception.<\/p>\n
“They enriched themselves by targeting programs designed for hard-working consumers and small businesses to buy materials for construction and home improvement,\u201d he said. \u201cToday\u2019s arrests serve as a warning to those who try to profit from retail fraud: crime doesn\u2019t pay.”<\/p>\n
United States Secret Service Special Agent-in-Charge Matt McCool said the agency “is proud to help disrupt an alleged criminal syndicate that carried out an elaborate fraud scheme here in New York City, siphoning millions of dollars into its coffers through bad checks in order to procure construction-related materials for illegitimate resale.”<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to congratulate our agents and our partners at both the Eastern District of New York and the NYPD for their hard work in holding these criminals accountable,” he added.<\/p>\n
New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the group “deceived credit lenders with bogus bank checks to steal more than $20 million of merchandise from hardware and home improvement businesses.”<\/p>\n
\u201cSchemes like this don\u2019t just affect retail corporations \u2013 they hurt honest consumers who rely on these programs to purchase trade supplies, she said. “I am thankful to the NYPD investigators, our federal partners at the United States Secret Service, and HSI, and the U.S Attorney\u2019s office for shutting this scam operation down and holding these fraudsters accountable.\u201d<\/p>\n
From around July 2023 until September 2025, the group and their co-conspirators opened, or caused others acting at their direction to open, hundreds of lines of credit that hardware and home improvement stores made available to customers through the stores\u2019 partner banks, prosecutors said.<\/p>\n
The lines of credit included traditional consumer credit cards, which were designed for individual consumers\u2019 personal use at the stores, and commercial lines of credit, which were aimed primarily for small businesses to purchase goods at the stores, according to prosecutors.<\/p>\n
The group opened many of these credit lines in the names of other people or on behalf of shell companies that had recently been founded or incorporated, and were created in the names of straw owners and\/or had no legitimate business operations, prosecutors said.<\/p>\n
To increase the credit limits on their credit lines, the group presented paper checks to the stores under the guise of pre-funding the accounts or paying for past purchases, prosecutors said, adding, that in reality, these checks were linked to bank accounts that had insufficient funds to cover the amounts printed on the checks.<\/p>\n
Before the checks were rejected, however, the group purchased significant amounts of building and construction materials for delivery to their warehouses, prosecutors said. In total, the defendants and their co-conspirators stole over $20 million in merchandise, much of which they resold to others, according to prosecutors.<\/p>\n
Profits of their scheme were then laundered to offshore bank accounts and used to finance the ongoing operations of their warehouses, prosecutors said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BROOKLYN, NY \u2014 A five-count indictment was unsealed in federal court this week charging five New York City…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":220079,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-220078","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-newyork","12":"tag-newyorkcity","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115189706066959055","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}