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Vancouver police deployed an undercover officer posing as a shoplifter who sold merchandise to the man and who received instructions to steal property from Home Depot.
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Authorities allege a Vancouver man was engaged in an elaborate fencing scheme that employed shoplifters and targeted large chain stores like Home Depot, Walmart and Best Buy.
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Under the scheme, the man would bring stolen goods, including computers, electronics, home improvement items and clothing, to various stores without a receipt in return for store credit. He would then use those credits to buy merchandise and receive a receipt and later return those items for cash.
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After receiving tips from retailers, Vancouver police deployed an undercover officer posing as a shoplifter who sold merchandise to the man and who received instructions to steal property from Home Depot.
The details of these allegations stem from four investigations dating to 2017 and are contained in court documents related to a civil forfeiture application seeking to keep items the VPD seized from two residences. They include more than $50,000 in cash, two vehicles and gift cards worth more than $120,000 from several large retailers.
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Over the years, police have also seized iPads and iPhones in their original packaging, bags of clothes with tags attached from Lululemon, Mark’s and SportChek, merchandise including linens and toothbrushes, printers and lingerie, power tools and watches, and hundreds of credit and debit cards and blank magnetic cards, according to the court documents.
Lawyers for Hao Luo, also known as Ken Luo, are challenging the application using a Charter argument that police didn’t have the legal right to search his residences or seize the goods or vehicles because the warrants weren’t based on reasonable and probable grounds that a crime had been committed.
During the first investigation, that began in May 2017, Home Depot called police to report Luo had returned stolen items to a store in exchange for store credit. He then used the credit to buy some more items at the store, and received a receipt, according to the petition.
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The VPD said in the court filing that Luo had purchased stolen property and Home Depot store credits from known shoplifters between March 2017 and April 2018.
In April 2018, police conducted surveillance of Luo and watched him leave his residence in Vancouver and return items, some purchased with fraudulent credit cards, to various stores in Delta and Surrey.
Over the next two weeks, an undercover VPD officer sold Luo “stolen” property on two occasions, and police one day watched him buy a Helly Hansen jacket and pants using a gift card and pay the rest using a fake credit card, the court documents state.
A couple of weeks later, the VPD executed a search warrant at his residence and seized gift cards, cash and boxed-or-tagged merchandise and arrested him for several offences, including theft, forgery and possession of stolen property.
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Similar seizures were conducted later in 2018 and in 2019. And he was charged in 2020 with possession and use of a stolen credit card, fraud, two counts of possession of stolen property and other offences.
In 2020, he pleaded guilty to fraud, possession and use of stolen card and counselling an indictable offence not committed, and was sentenced to a conditional discharge and three years’ probation, according to provincial court documents.
In his response to the forfeiture claim, Luo says he has been employed as a service technician for a dental supply company for 15 years and his wife was an early childhood educator until 2015. He says he earned the money to buy the cars through “legitimate and lawful income.” And that the VPD searched his homes and cars illegally.
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In its most recent application to the court, the civil forfeiture director said he seeks through forfeiture the money, gift cards, merchandise, store credit cards, a laptop and iPads as “proceeds and instruments of unlawful activity.”
It says if Luo wants the items returned he must “plead an interest” in the property. The application calls it “mischief” and an “abuse” for a person who doesn’t claim ownership of the seized items to seek their return.
“The defendant seeks to embroil the director and the court in what will be protracted and expensive constitutional litigation,” it said.
None of the allegations in the court documents have been proven in court.
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