The couple that coupons together, stays together – unless those coupons are fake, and then it gets complicated.
A Pennsylvania husband and wife are due to make their first court appearance this afternoon, after they were arrested and charged with using hundreds of counterfeit coupons to buy cartloads of Ensure nutrition shakes.
27-year-old Soud Kanan and his wife, 25-year-old Asmaa Kanan of Sharon, Pennsylvania were taken into custody Wednesday evening. It happened in a grocery store parking lot across the state line in Alliance, Ohio, about an hour’s drive from their home.
Police say the two were shopping at a Marc’s grocery store and were seen pushing two carts filled with dozens of Ensure multipacks, along with several small items like gum and candy. Soud Kanan allegedly headed to checkout first, using 190 counterfeit coupons, bringing a $892.73 total down to just $43.94.
Investigators were already on the lookout for the pair after a similar incident the week before. At that time, police say Soud Kanan was right down the street from Marc’s at a Meijer. “There,” the police incident report reads, “the defendant loaded two carts containing 84 packs of Ensure drinks valued at $703.36. At the self-checkout, the defendant created five different transactions, scanning four packs of the drinks at a time. He then scanned four fraudulent coupons per transaction. The remaining 64 packs of drinks were not scanned at all.”
Surveillance video allegedly showed the suspect exiting the store and loading the 84 packs of Ensure into a Penske rental van.
Police said they received an anonymous tip that the duo was shopping in the area again on Wednesday. When police tracked the couple to Marc’s, that’s when they moved in. After Soud Kanan completed his transaction, they say Asmaa Kanan “abandoned a second cart containing 60 packs of Ensure drinks,” left the store and “attempted counter-surveillance in the parking lot.”
But police confronted the couple before they could even unload their cart. After handcuffing both, police said they found hundreds more packs of Ensure in the back of their truck. Those packs, they believe, were from earlier visits to two nearby Marc’s stores.
Police did not divulge the precise types and values of the coupons that were used. But Alliance Police Sgt. Christopher McCord told Coupons in the News that the couple used multiples of just two different coupons, hundreds of each at a time. And that’s just a small sampling of the counterfeit Ensure coupons that are out there. The Coupon Information Corporation’s list of known counterfeits contains nearly 200 examples of fraudulent Ensure coupons, with values ranging from $2 to $20.
The Kanans have been charged with felony theft by deception, for allegedly stealing nearly $1,600 worth of merchandise. If convicted, they could be imprisoned for up to a year and fined up to $2,500.
It’s not known what exactly they were planning to do with all that Ensure. But it looks like the only thing they’ve now ensured, is that they won’t be couponing again in Alliance, Ohio anytime soon.
Image sources: City of Alliance Police Department
