Fraud - Banking

Here's a situation where I haven't been able to determine what is going on, and I thought I would put the minds at AK to work to come up with some theories.

We have a member who is receiving ALOT of refunds from JCPenney (4 or 5 different store locations) on their debit card. However, there are NO purchases from JCPenney on that debit card. We are talking hundreds of dollars per transaction going into their account - but no purchases ever being made. We're seeing a couple thousand dollars per month being refunded into the account.

Now, usually a merchant only refunds to the card you purchased the goods with. I've gone through all the normal scenarios, and we've contacted JCPenney's fraud departments at each store (talk about a waste of time - you'd think they would be interested in possible thefts), but have come up empty so far.

Any ideas or thoughts on what kind of scam they might be in on? Or possibly a legitimate reason for these types of transactions?

I've seen alot of weird stuff over the years - but nothing like this.

The popular scam now is fraudsters are going to court houses and finding recorded mortgages for home equity lines of credit and then trying to get the financial institution to do cash advances off the line and wire the money to another location.

Perhaps they are getting the merchandise hot then going to JCP and wanting a refund. Some stores allow refunds without reciepts (although they usually do a bar code scan to make sure that the item was bought at the store.)

Just a thought.

how funny would it be to have these scammers go though all of this trouble to get this big JCPenney heist going.....only to give them the wrong account number. :)

Which is why i don't think it's a scam. If i were stealing from someone, i'd want to make sure I got my money. and since they aren't, but the deposits continue, it won't be noticed until accounting season. maybe some weird account too....

I bet it's a small account error, maybe a one off routing number issue.
do you know what bank JCPenney uses?

be sure to fill us in, I'm interested.

We finally got a hold of some people in their fraud department who have opened an investigation into the activity so I will keep you posted with what we find out. I don't know which bank JCP uses for their transactions.

It's possible it could be a wrong account number, but this account has had other 'interesting' transactions before. And, I might add, the account holder immediately hits the ATM or comes into one of our branches to withdraw the money from their account.