BEAVERTON – Sealtiel Chacon Zepeda was standing at a Fred Meyer sales register spending a gift card when curiosity struck.

He wondered how gift cards worked, how the little magnetic strip on the back of them turned cash into store credit and how easily he could reproduce the information stored on the card.

His questions, answered by 20 hours of Internet research, sparked an idea that led to Zepeda stealing $6,000 at local stores, rendering numerous customers unable to use their gift cards.

The idea: cloning gift cards.

Zepeda, 22, who pleaded guilty last week in Washington County Circuit Court to five counts of computer crime, used a system that Beaverton Police Detective Michael Hanada said law enforcement nationally had hardly seen in early 2009, when Zepeda was scamming retailers, and local police haven't seen since.

Zepeda cloned gift cards that others had purchased using a computer program he found online and the swipe of a card through a magnetic card reader that was also capable of rewriting the card's information.

"This is the first time I've ever seen it," Hanada said. "This was really unique."

The case began in January 2009 when local Fred Meyer stores started receiving complaints from customers who came in to redeem gift cards only to find their cards had a zero balance.

Many stores, including Fred Meyer, offer a service for customers to check the balance on their gift cards online or over the phone by entering in the gift card's number. Fred Meyer Stores' fraud investigators detected that the cards had been tampered with when they saw that each card racked up hundreds of balance inquiries a day.

The average gift card user might check the card's balance online once in the card's lifetime, Hanada said, so this activity strongly suggested the work of a non-human inquirer. The culprit was a computer program that Zepeda downloaded to electronically check the card's balance many times a day.

Police linked Zepeda to the crime through his computer's Internet protocol address and store video surveillance. They caught him cashing in a cloned Fred Meyer gift card in February 2009, and he told them the details of the scam, Hanada said.

After researching how gift cards work, Zepeda purchased a magnetic card reader online, began stealing blank gift cards, on display for purchase, from Fred Meyer and scanning them with his reader. He would then return some of the scanned cards to the store and wait for a computer program to alert him when the cards were activated and loaded with money.

Using a magnetic card writer, Zepeda then rewrote one of the leftover stolen gift card's magnetic strip with the activated card's information, thus creating a cloned card.

While the system doesn't require advanced computer knowledge, Hanada said, it does demand a diligent criminal.

Zepeda used the cloned gift cards to buy goods for himself, buy goods to sell or buy goods to return for cash, Deputy District Attorney Bik-Na Han said.

Police found about 1,000 stolen gift cards in Zepeda's Hillsboro residence, Hanada said. He ran the same scam at numerous other stores, including Abercrombie & Fitch, American Eagle, Apple, Best Buy, Macy's and Spencer Gifts, according to police reports. But Fred Meyer was the only store willing to work with authorities in this case, Hanada said. Other stores likely didn't want customers to worry about the security of their company's gift cards, Hanada said.

Fred Meyer spokeswoman Melinda Merrill said the company has taken preventive measures since the thefts.

Hanada said while similar cases of gift card fraud have become more common in the past year, they are still infrequent. Gift cards generally yield petty amounts of cash, he said, so credit and debit card fraud remains more common, although more risky.

Zepeda's suspicious computer activity helped authorities put a stop to his theft after only a few weeks of investigating, but the multiple steps required to pull off the scam still impressed Han. Of the fraud cases she prosecutes, she said this was one of the more organized.

"Most are pretty one- to two-dimensional," she said. "This one was very elaborate."

Zepeda was sentenced to 18 months of formal probation for the five counts of computer crime and a simultaneous drunk driving conviction. If he violates the terms of his probation, his plea agreement requires him to serve 13 months in prison.

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