Some warm, some cold. But all hot.

The scheme was “not to get free Domino’s,” Deputy Inspector Joseph Gulotta said, “but free Domino’s was the bottom line.”

One of the many kinds of identity theft is the black-market sale of stolen credit card numbers. No card is necessary: just the number and the three-digit security code that goes with it. A thief buys a list of those numbers. The next step is to see which ones have not been canceled.

In Brooklyn, news spread of a way of doing this, according to Inspector Gulotta, a former commanding officer of a precinct in Brownsville.

“Word of mouth, social media,” he said. “It flies.”

Several people with no apparent connection to one another were using a Domino’s smartphone app to order pizzas — lots of pizzas, up to $50 per order — in order after order, Inspector Gulotta said. The app allows the user to enter an address and a credit-card number, and presto, a short time later, along comes the pizza delivery.

Investigators, working with a Domino’s loss-prevention office, were able to determine which recent orders had been paid for with stolen credit card numbers. Days or weeks later, the rightful owners of the cards — “from all over the country,” Inspector Gulotta said — noticed that they had seemed to have bought a lot of pizza in Brooklyn, and contested the charges. Domino’s was left to pay the credit cards back for its own pies.