Man in retail theft ring, found with 5,000 Target gift cards, sentenced by Sacramento judge

A man arrested during a Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office retail theft operation last year was convicted and sentenced to jail after he tampered with thousands of Target gift cards as part of a scheme to siphon money through a nationwide organized crime network, prosecutors said.

Ningning Sun pleaded no contest to felony charges of being involved in organized retail theft, attempted grand theft, receipt of stolen property and unlawful possession of an access card and a misdemeanor charge of resisting a police officer.

Deputies arrested Sun as part of a widescale operation dubbed “Bad Elf” in which 285 people accused of stealing from 12 stores were arrested, Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper announced in December.

Sun was sentenced to three years and eight months, prosecutors said. The first year of his sentence will be spent in Sacramento County Main Jail, with the remaining time to be served as mandatory supervision. Sun is also prohibited from approaching all Target locations and must pay restitution to Target in an amount that has not yet been determined, prosecutors said.

The 39-year-old was arrested after he acted “suspiciously” at a Sacramento Target. He took gift cards from a rack and replaced them with ones from his own jacket, prosecutors said. Sun attempted to flee the store without paying for the items.

When confronted, deputies saw about 200 gift cards fall out of Sun’s jacket, prosecutors said. A search led investigators to find more than 5,000 gift cards from Targets statewide in his car.

“These operations are very sophisticated and modifications to the gift cards are often virtually undetectable, even to the trained eye,” the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office said previously.

Sun tampered with gift cards’ barcodes so money would be routed to him, prosecutors said.

“Victims are completely unaware it is happening, and the money is often siphoned to an off-shore account within seconds,” deputies said previously.

This scheme played out in Target stores across the U.S. from Nevada to Tennessee, prosecutors said. Sun acted as an “organizer and runner” for a large crime network shown by a spreadsheet he managed containing names and payment information of his contacts.

“The amount of intended loss from the gift cards ranged from $31,125 to $2,869,000, depending on how much was placed on the cards by possible future victims who purchased them,” the Sacramento District Attorney’s Office said in a news release.