A Walmart driver exposed a $1.4M fraud ring using hacked customer accounts after noticing up to 50 packages piled up at one Arizona home

William Kennedy, a Peoria police officer, told Arizona’s Family that, “Without that delivery driver, I don’t know if it would have come across our radar.” Peoria Police described the unnamed driver as “the wonderful reporting citizen.”

The police added that their investigation “identified a network allegedly using stolen credit card information from Walmart customer accounts to purchase merchandise online.”

Arizona’s Family reports that court documents cite 15,500 orders on Walmart’s website allegedly delivered to six different houses. Kennedy said purchases included, “stuff for the dogs, the kids, their house, all those types of items.” The outlet also said police confirmed $57,501 in chargeback losses to two Walmart customers, as well as $8,821 in fraudulent purchases impacting 203 JPMorgan Chase customers.

Peoria police added the allegedly stolen items were shipped to Vietnam, and that search warrants recovered around $45,000 worth of gold bars, $35,000 in cash and $25,000 worth of merchandise.

Account takeover fraud is hitting millions

Court documents named the six people charged in the alleged Walmart fraud as Hie Xuan Le, Hailey Hang Nguyen, Hoai Nguyen, Minh Ngoc Nguyen, Uy Vu Phan and Thien Tran, with Arizona’s Family adding the charges include identity theft, fraud and trafficking stolen property, among others.

When reached for comment about the alleged thefts and how the company plans to prevent similar fraud in the future, a Walmart spokesperson simply told Moneywise, “We care about our customers and we are committed to helping prevent fraud, and working with law enforcement to hold bad actors accountable.”

Peoria police didn’t reply to Moneywise’s request for comment, while a JPMorgan Chase spokesperson declined comment.

While this isn’t the first instance of a breach of Walmart customer accounts, the retailer is hardly alone in falling victim to hackers. In July, for example, Chick-fil-A One loyalty accounts across 10 states faced threats of personal information exposure from a cyberattack, while last December a study co-authored by NordVPN researchers warned that thousands of airline and hotel loyalty accounts had been hacked, with their information sold on the dark web, while owners may have been unaware.

In April, meanwhile, financial services research firm Javelin reported an 18% year-over-year increase in account takeover victims between 2024 and 2025, totalling six million.

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) says account takeover fraud — where criminals gain access to one or more of your private financial accounts — can result from various traps, including phishing emails, impersonation fraud that gets customers to give up login credentials, and even simply taking advantage of weak account passwords.

Even worse, identity theft protection company Aura warns that a breach of a customer account at a retailer like Walmart can lead to worse issues, such as identity theft, the sale of your information to other scammers and, if you use the same password for multiple accounts, a breach of those others that share it.

Aura added that unexpected charges on your credit card statement, notifications for purchases you didn’t make and an inability to log into your Walmart account could all be signs of a hack.

Ways to keep your accounts — and personal information — safe

Walmart tells customers never to click on suspicious emails or links and that, if you see strange charges, contact the company and your banking institution, delete your payment information in the account and reset your password on that site and any others where you may use it.