After less than seven minutes of deliberations, a jury in St. Louis has found a local man guilty of double-dipping with Kohl’s Cash to the tune of more than $200,000.
35-year-old Marshall Lampkin was indicted back in 2023, accused of carrying out a purchase-and-return scheme, “rolling” the same Kohl’s Cash over and over again during a five-month period in late 2021 and early 2022.
As Kohl’s shoppers know, for every $50 you spend during designated earning periods, you’ll get a $10 Kohl’s Cash coupon for a discount on a future purchase. If you return an item purchased with Kohl’s Cash, you’ll get a refund in the form of new Kohl’s Cash.
Lampkin figured out how to use his Kohl’s Cash indefinitely, to get hundreds of thousands of dollars in merchandise for nothing.
“The scheme hinged on a short electronic lag in the Kohl’s Cash customer account system,” federal prosecutors explained. As laid out in the indictment, Lampkin would make an in-store purchase using Kohl’s Cash, and then immediately buy the same items online using the very same Kohl’s Cash, “before Kohl’s system could account for the in-store purchase and remove the Kohl’s Cash from Defendant Lampkin’s Kohl’s online shopping account.”
Then, once his second purchase was on its way to be delivered, he would go to a different Kohl’s location to return the items he had purchased in-store, to get his Kohl’s Cash back. Rinse and repeat.
In one case described in the indictment, he made an online purchase just three minutes after using his Kohl’s Cash in store, then returned his in-store purchase the next day. Two months later, he got even faster, making an online purchase less than a minute after buying the same items in store.
Each purchase was “generally for more than $1,000” at a time. Prosecutors said Lampkin made in-store purchases in 40 different Kohl’s stores across 12 states, and made at least 400 online purchases, collecting more than $200,000 worth of merchandise for which he never had to pay a penny.
An informant who had worked with Lampkin tipped off a St. Louis County detective, who looped in a United States Secret Service special agent to investigate the scheme. They discovered that Kohl’s had already caught on, disabling Lampkin’s ability to use Kohl’s Cash online and “directing store personnel to be alert should Lampkin attempt to further defraud the retailer.”
At one point, prosecutors described how he enlisted his mother to help, by accompanying her as she made in-store purchases and attempted returns under her name. But Kohl’s immediately caught on to that workaround and had them escorted out of the store.
The informant led investigators to a storage unit (pictured above) where the online Kohl’s purchases were kept. Some items were offered for sale on Facebook, while some were pawned for quick cash (but the informant “believed that Lampkin had an emotional attachment to the merchandise, and he would repurchase the items from the pawnshops and return the items to the storage units.”) The rest, Lampkin allegedly referred to as his “retirement fund,” as the informant explained that Lampkin “planned to accumulate $1,000,000 of merchandise and sell the entirety to an ‘end-buyer’ in New York.”
Instead, the merchandise was seized, Lampkin was charged with mail fraud, and the jury found him guilty on five counts. He’s scheduled to be sentenced on December 8th, and faces a maximum penalty of up to 20 years imprisonment and $250,000 in fines, in addition to forfeiting all of the merchandise he collected.
Kohl’s did not respond to a request for comment about whether the “short electronic lag” in its system has been fixed, so that no one else is able to replicate Lampkin’s scheme. But to anyone wondering if it might work for them, too – Lampkin’s case shows that their curiosity could prove to be very costly.
Image source: U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Missouri
