An Anaheim man was sentenced Monday to eight months of home confinement after admitting in federal court to having obtained legitimate Kohl's department store coupons, circumvented security features to prevent duplication and sold thousands of copies of the coupons on eBay for $93,000 $96,000*.
Boi Quoc Vo, 30, was also ordered to pay a $10,000 fine, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Joshua Robbins.
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Southern California Man Faces 20 Years In Prison For $93,000 Kohl's Coupon Scam
A month after Vo signed a formal guilty plea in September, federal officials said he was facing a maximum punishment of 20 years in prison.
Under the plea deal, he admitted that from September 2011 through June 2012, he created fake identities at online auction websites to sell thousands of phony Kohl's coupons to unsuspecting consumers in multiple states. Robbins previously said the reason the government knew the amount of Vo's illegal profits was because the 2011 UC Irvine graduate in Political Science kept detailed records of his scam.
This was the first counterfeit store coupon scheme the feds have come across in Southern California, according to Claude Arnold, an ICE special agent.
*The initial government complaint claimed $93,000 in illegal revenue but, after studying the case, the prosecutor determined it was actually $96,000, which is the number agreed to in the guilty plea deal. Vo sold 136,000 counterfeit Kohl's coupons with a face value of more than $1.3 million to derive that illegal revenue.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.