AG: Pennsylvania man stole identities to buy, sell $100K in merch from Lowe's, Giant Eagle
The Organized Retail Crime Unit charged Cornelius P. Tucker, 33, of Pittsburgh, with more than 200 counts of felony identity theft and related offenses.
According to Attorney General Dave Sunday, Tucker allegedly stole hundreds of identities and made purchases at Lowe's and Giant Eagle. He then put those items up for sale, at a discount, on social media, notably on Facebook.
'This defendant placed hundreds of online orders, under the names and accounts of unsuspecting victims, then fenced the goods to buyers on Facebook,' Sunday said. 'This arrest resulted from a meticulous investigation by our Organized Retail Crime Unit, which would not have been possible without a network of collaborating partners committed to stopping these sophisticated schemes.'
Tucker allegedly racked up more than $100,000 by purchasing items such as power tools and home security systems, which he then sold through his Facebook page, 'Pittsburgh Stamps.'Sunday said Tucker would place the order and pick them up at the stores throughout Allegheny, Beaver, Crawford, Washington, and Westmoreland counties.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
22 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Posts claiming Nigerian ‘Yahoo boy' scammed Trump out of $250k are misleading
'A yahoo boy scammed a whole Donald Trump, the President of US 250,000 dollars. Some of you are really audacious', reads an X post published on July 4, 2025. 'Yahoo' is Nigerian slang for internet fraud. Shared more than 3,000 times, the post was published by an account called 'Shola', a self-proclaimed life coach with over 373,000 followers. Comments under the post suggest that some readers believe it is genuine. 'If these guys get the chance, they'll scam God,' one commenter wrote. 'Scammed a whole Donald Trump? Bro playing fraud on Hall of Fame difficulty,' added another user. The claim was also shared elsewhere on X (here and here) and on Facebook in English (here) and French (here). The Economic and Financial Crime Commission reported in May that cybercrime, advance fee fraud and money laundering accounted for the highest number of offences out of the record-breaking 4,111 total convictions by the agency in 2024 — in a country where 70% of the population is under the age of 30 (archived here and here). Several high-profile cyber-fraud cases have been linked to Nigerians outside the country. Nigerian Instagram influencer Ramon Olorunwa Abbas was handed an 11-year jail term in the United States in 2022 after being found guilty of conspiring 'to launder tens of millions of dollars through a series of online scams' (archived here). Abidemi Rufai, a politician and aide to the Ogun state governor in southwest Nigeria, was also convicted in the US for a similar crime in 2022 (archived here). He was sacked after his crime came to light. However, the claim that a Nigerian 'Yahoo boy' scammed Trump is misleading. Official records from the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) confirm that there was a $250,300 cryptocurrency scam, but Donald Trump was not the direct victim (archived here). The funds were actually fraudulently diverted from a donor intending to support the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee, after scammers impersonated Steve Witkoff, the committee's co-chair and finance director. Prosecutors filed a complaint in a federal court that fraudsters sent emails from a domain posing as the official inaugural account. The scammers used the address@ with a lowercase 'L' replacing the 'i' in the legitimate @ to solicit over $250,000 in cryptocurrency (archived here). The victim transferred the funds, which were quickly moved across multiple cryptocurrency wallets, including a Nigeria-based Binance account linked to the name Ehiremen Aigbokhan. 'It appeared likely that Aigbokhan received an international transfer of funds from the U.S. to Nigeria as a result of his fraudulent activity,' prosecutors said in the document. The suspect allegedly used several crypto wallets and exchanges to launder the money. The FBI seized a total of 40,353 that the federal agency said was connected to the fraud, with about half taken from Aigbokhan's accounts. Digital forensics linked him to the Binance account that received part of the stolen funds. The FBI is now seeking Aigbokhan's arrest. International media, including The Independent UK and American magazine Fortune, reported on the case (archived here and here). The story was covered by multiple Nigerian newspapers, some of whose headlines may have created confusion. One titled its article "How Lagos Yahoo Boy duped U.S. President Donald Trump of 2025 inauguration funds" while another used the headline "FBI pursues Lagos Yahoo Boy for defrauding U.S. President Donald Trump of 2025 inauguration funds" before going on to explain in the text that a donor was scammed.
Buzz Feed
2 hours ago
- Buzz Feed
19 Worst Unbelievable Lies Told By Pathological Liars
Recently, I came across a Reddit post from user Difficult-Mix-2337 on the popular Ask Reddit page asking, "People who've known pathological liars, what's the craziest lie they tried to get away with?" and wow, people did not disappoint. The answers were pretty juicy, so I figured I had to share. Here are some of the best: "A girl I met in college told everyone a different backstory about her life. One day, I was hanging out with a group of people and her name came up. Turns out she told every single one of us something different — where she was from, who she was dating, her upbringing, etc. Her stories ranged from having to sell cows to attend college to being raised in the hood. She ended up getting kicked out of nursing school. Why? For lying about serious situations during clinicals." "He told everyone he was an undercover CIA agent while working at a gas station." "My mom tried to pretend like she died. She made a Facebook page pretending to be some random man and posted about how she had a funeral and none of her kids showed up. Nobody in our family believed her but she had some people who were really sad. A few weeks later, she came out and said that her friend stole her phone and made the Facebook page." "In the US-based medieval reenactment group, we had the occasional European immigrant. In one case, this new Irish guy turned up. He was pretty charming, and he had good potential, so he was taken in by the group. Only there were these two drunk dudes who would follow him around, waiting for his 'fake Irish accent' to drop." "You see, despite people pretending to be medieval Europeans in costume, nobody put on a fake accent, or if they did, they certainly didn't have it 24 hours a day, including when they weren't at reenactment events. But these two party animal bros were completely convinced he was just faking a 'Pippin' accent from Lord of the Rings. I thought they were obnoxious; here is a real Irish guy, with a real family in Ireland, and these two drunk Americans are teasing him and calling him a faker." "Well, fast forward a few months, and this Irish guy has met a woman in the organization, they've gotten serious, and they're going to have a baby. Then all of a sudden, it comes to light that those two drunk dudes were the only ones who saw through him right from the start. He was totally an American guy who faked an Irish accent, got caught in a lie, doubled down, and found his whole life revolving around this fabricated personal history of those two guys really were good judges of character." "Oh man, I have a few but my favorite was that they have no fingerprints. They 'wore off' from years of gardening, hahaha." "A guy I was in a serious relationship with told a ton of lies. Took me a while to figure it out. When I did, I had a debrief with his sister, who had more stories." "An old coworker of mine made it to 40 after three heart attacks, four different cancers, two dead mothers, a deadbeat father, a Wall Street father, a single father, a single who is to say what else? He got fired for doing something that cost our company $2.5 million and lying about it even though he was on camera." "I had been told that somebody was a 'story-topper' type who always had to have a bigger story, no matter what the subject. One day, the subject of fishing came up, and he bragged about catching a 20-pound bass out of a nearby lake. I didn't think anything of it." "I knew a guy who was active military, a really strange guy. He used to tell us some of his so-called 'sea stories.' One that particularly stuck was that he went off on a weekend bender, somehow ended up in the desert in Saudi Arabia fighting a penguin, but was able to make it back to report for duty on Monday morning. He was stationed stateside at the time. We tried to call him on it, but he swore up and down it was true." "I once witnessed a group conversation about feeding babies, and they were talking about breast milk vs. formula. One person related that they knew someone whose mother fed them goat milk as a baby. Immediately, this other person said, "I was raised on mouse's milk," completely straight-faced, as though nobody would even think to question it." "I had a weird experience in a grocery store back in 2009 or so and I told a couple of people about it. Fast forward to 2022 and one of those same people relayed that exact story to me, only in their version, it happened to them." "Someone I used to be acquainted with recently was exposed for faking stage four brain cancer. She had her entire family convinced, including her parents. She faked doctor's visits, lab results, etc. Posted videos in tears about how she was dying and was trying to qualify for clinical trials as her 'last chance.' I started smelling smoke when she would talk about how difficult it was to be balding when she still had a full head of hair." "I knew a girl in high school who lied about being pregnant. A couple weeks later, she lost the baby after her boyfriend pushed her down the stairs." "My mom lies about what she's had for lunch. She lies about the dumbest stuff that doesn't even matter. I call her out on it and get gaslit. So effing weird." "My sister got pulled over after she got a DUI. I was a passenger. I asked her previously if her license had been revoked, and she had told me no. I asked her again as the police officer walked up to the car, and she said, 'No, my license is not revoked.' The police officer got to the car, and through the rolled down windows said, 'Ma'am, you are driving on a revoked license.' I don't really talk to her anymore, because of this situation and many, many others." "Oh. I got a good one. He said he was part of a secret military experiment where his DNA was bonded with cougar DNA." "My sister put makeup bruises on so she could tell people at school she was being abused at home. Why? No idea. But it led to CPS getting involved and ultimately concluding no wrongdoing. Afterward, my mom sent her to live with our alcoholic father. From what I heard, it was not a pleasant few years for her." "I was in a band that had just formed. We had like three songs and hadn't played a show. This guy in the band claimed he got us a gig opening for Train and a $100,000,000 record deal. He said a lot of things." And finally: "My mom could not retell a story without embellishing it to save her life. Each time she told the story, it would get wilder and wilder. Occasionally, she would try to tell me some wild tale. I'd listen carefully and at the end I'd simply say, 'Mom, you forgot that I was there when it happened.' She'd just go quiet for a while before starting again." What do you think? Let me know down below — and if you have your own examples to share, go for it! I love hearing the drama.
Los Angeles Times
13 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Amid ICE raids, bishop tells SoCal worshippers they can stay home on Sundays
A Southern California Roman Catholic bishop told his diocese of roughly one million parishioners this week that they can stay home on Sundays to avoid Mass while concerns about federal immigration sweeps still loom over the region. Bishop Alberto Rojas of the Diocese of San Bernardino wrote in the decree Tuesday that many church-goers have shared 'fears of attending mass due to potential immigration enforcement action' and that 'such fear constitutes a grave inconvenience that may impede the spiritual good of the faithful.' In lieu of Sunday service, Rojas encouraged his members to 'maintain their spiritual communion' by praying the rosary or reading scripture and directed diocese ministers to offer support and compassion to the affected. Since early June, countless Southern California families have been living in fear and gone underground amid an extraordinary federal immigration enforcement push by the Trump administration. Nearly 2,800 people have been caught up in the sweeps in the L.A. area alone, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of undocumented immigrants without any criminal record. The threat of an immigration raid has rippled through all aspects of Southern California life, including church attendance, where some houses of worship say up to a third or half their congregants are no longer showing up in person. According to the National Catholic Reporter, multiple people were arrested at or near diocese churches on June 20, including a man at Our Lady of Lourdes in Montclair, which ICE officials dispute. 'The accusation that ICE entered a church to make an arrest [is] FALSE,' wrote Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin in an email to The Times. 'The illegal alien chose to pull into the church parking lot [and] officers then safely made the arrest.' Days later, Rojas wrote a message to worshipers on Facebook. He said that he respected and appreciated law enforcement's role in keeping 'communities safe from violent criminals,' but added that 'authorities are now seizing brothers and sisters indiscriminately, without respect for their right to due process and their dignity as children of God.' As for his latest edict allowing worshipers to forgo Mass, Rojas said it will remain in effect until further notice or until the circumstances 'necessitating this decree are sufficiently resolved.' Times staff writers Andrew Castillo, Rachel Uranga and Queenie Wong contributed to this report.
