A Chinese organized crime group broke into an internal Staples customer service system and used it to issue more than 15,000 gift cards worth over $5 million, according to a federal search warrant application unsealed last week and reported on Monday by 404 Media.
Members of the ring then spent the cards at Target, Sephora, Lowe’s and other chains, buying electronics and other goods, and shipped much of it to China. They redeemed 4,630 of the hacked cards, worth about $425,000, according to the document.
The warrant application doesn’t name the victim. It describes an office supply company headquartered in Massachusetts that reported the hack to Homeland Security Investigations in October 2023, that uses Blackhawk Network to fill its gift card orders and that runs an internal customer support system called Nexus. Joseph Cox of 404 Media said all of those details match Staples, and he found a reference to Nexus on a former Staples executive’s LinkedIn profile. Staples did not respond to 404 Media’s requests for comment.
Staples believed Nexus could be reached only from its own computers. It could not. The hackers got in from outside and ran several heap dump requests, which capture everything held in an application’s memory at a given moment, the document says. With what came back, they hijacked the sessions of customer service representatives who were logged in, issued the cards and sent them to email accounts they controlled.
Then came the shopping. At one Target in New Hampshire, 35 cards from the Staples hack were used to buy Apple, Bose and Powerbeats products in a single hour, along with cards from other sources. Surveillance footage showed four men “appearing one after another, occasionally interacting with one another and the cashiers.”
The document names three of them as M. Chen, X. Chen and Jiang, and the fourth is unidentified. Each held up a phone so the cashier could scan an electronic Target gift card, then pulled up another, until the cards on their phones were “exhausted.” Store employees knew them well. The men “came into the store almost every day to make numerous large purchases of Apple products using gift cards,” the document says.
Target gave investigators data showing the group used 3,850 cards, worth about $141,000, in 300 transactions at 85 stores in 18 states over two days. Sephora said about 330 cards worth $58,600 were redeemed online across 1,500 transactions. At Lowe’s, 450 cards totaling $226,000 were redeemed in person and online at more than 22 locations.
The hack ties into a case federal prosecutors in New Hampshire have partly closed. On April 22, 2025, the U.S. attorney’s office in Concord announced that three Chinese nationals, Naxin Wu and Mengying Jiang of Nashua and Mingdong Chen of Brooklyn, had been sentenced after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Mengying Jiang received 60 months in prison, Naxin Wu 33 months and Mingdong Chen 24 months, according to the IRS announcement, and each faces deportation. Prosecutors held them responsible for $3 million, $1.4 million and $400,000 in fraudulent cards.
That operation was far bigger than the Staples hack. Court documents in the case said criminals in China had obtained “well over $100 million in gift cards through multiple fraudulent means,” including hacking U.S. companies, tampering with physical cards and running romance and elder fraud schemes. The card data was sold through a China-based messaging app to cells in the United States for cryptocurrency, prosecutors said. The cells bought high-value electronics, mostly Apple products, stored them in warehouses and shipped them to China, Hong Kong or Southeast Asia. They favored states with no sales tax, like New Hampshire.
The 2025 announcement mentioned the hacking of U.S. companies. It didn’t name Staples.
“The defendants acted as an integral cog of this international scheme by monetizing the ill-gotten gains obtained by Chinese hackers and scammers that victimized U.S. businesses and the citizens of the United States,” Thomas Demeo, then the acting special agent in charge of the IRS Criminal Investigation Boston field office, said at the time.
Another man, Jinbin Ren, 38, of Lynnfield, Mass., has been indicted on one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, Patch reported. He is accused of working with Mengying Jiang, Naxin Wu, Mingdong Chen and others to take merchandise from a Walmart in Concord and other stores with fraudulent gift cards, gather it in Salem and ship it overseas.