Todd Bookman, reporting for New Hampshire Public Radio, one week ago:

Last May, Gui Lin, a 41-year-old from China, pulled his car into the parking lot of an industrial complex in Derry, New Hampshire and began unloading boxes from his trunk.

A surveillance camera captured what happens next: A U-Haul van pulls up in front of Lin’s car. Three men wielding knives and duct tape exit the van. There’s a struggle. Another man comes running from inside the building to try and help Lin, but the assailants slash at him. Lin then stumbles back into the frame of the video. He’s been stabbed in the chest and leg. The U-Haul drives off.

Lin was taken to a hospital, where he died that afternoon. His heart had been punctured.

Absolutely tragic.

The boxes Lin was unloading purportedly contained thousands of dollars’ worth of Apple products, purchased with stolen gift cards.

The Derry warehouse where Lin was killed, authorities say, is one of more than a dozen facilities operating in New Hampshire that serve as a kind of way station for the unauthorized transfer of iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices. Inside, workers — who court documents say are Chinese nationals — receive, repackage, and export tens of thousands of electronics. The devices are purchased using proceeds from stolen gift cards, part of a “highly organized and sophisticated organized crime ring,” according to court records. […]

And New Hampshire, authorities say, appears to be the epicenter of this global criminal operation for a simple reason: the state’s lack of a sales tax.

The gift card scheme is sophisticated: steal cards from various retail stores, record the card numbers and PINs, repackage and return them to the stores, wait for unsuspecting buyers to load them with money, and then drain the cards. This is done at an enormous scale—thousands of cards.

Most of the discussion I’ve seen about this report has focused on how to protect yourself from being victimized by this scheme.

I’m infuriated by the apparent institutional failure exposed by the purchases of Apple products:

Apple products may be purchased with up to a dozen different stolen gift card numbers. Each phone, or sometimes an Apple Watch or iPad, is purchased using a fabricated name, but the products are shipped to specific warehouses in New Hampshire […]

The scale of the scheme is mind-boggling: Apple, working with police, determined that the company shipped 46,364 products to a single warehouse in Windham, New Hampshire during a 10-week window last summer, with a total value of $47 million. That works out to an average of $600,000 a day in Apple products to a single location. A separate facility in Amherst received another $35 million in iPhones over the same period.

Shipping 46,000 products to a single location didn’t raise any suspicions inside Apple? Is there a legitimate business out there that’s buying $47 million of Apple products over a ten-week period, at retail prices, without anyone at Apple even raising an eyebrow? At that volume, I would at least expect a business manager to reach out to establish a relationship. How did this not raise flags?

This story is especially galling coming as it does on the heels of Apple’s self-congratulatory App Store fraud prevention announcement.

I’m sure Apple has data showing the average number of gift cards used in any transaction, the value of those purchases, whether they’re from new or repeat customers, where the products are shipped, and a vast multitude of additional datapoints that could have flagged these purchases. I really hope that, in the year since this scheme was revealed, Apple has implemented meaningful measures that will help prevent another deadly scam.

(Via Michael Tsai.)