A 22-year-old Grand Haven man has agreed to forfeit about $630,000 in cryptocurrency and cash as well as give up his computer tower after pleading guilty to dark web buying and selling of stolen mPerks account access information.
Nicholas Mui pleaded guilty Monday to conducting a criminal enterprise in the Kent County Circuit Court.
Thousands of Meijer customers were compromised in the crime, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said in January, and Meijer was forced to make the customers whole to the tune of more than $1 million.
The investigation, which began in the spring, was led by Meijer investigators, Michigan State Police and the attorney general’s FORCE (Focused Organized Retail Crime Enforcement) team.
“Their complex investigation has been instrumental in securing hundreds of thousands of dollars in restitution and safeguarding a loyalty program used by many across our state,” Nessel said Tuesday.
Mui is expected to be sentenced Sept. 5. As part of his plea agreement, one count of using a computer to commit a crime and seven counts of identity theft were dropped.
Mui was accused of acquiring mPerks account information from the dark web and then selling the data to people who later used the points on Meijer purchases. At the time of his arraignment, officials said they had seized about $20,000 in cash and $460,000 in digital currency wallets.
Nessel’s office and Michigan State Police were contacted last spring by Meijer, which had received complaints from multiple customers saying their mPerks points had been wiped from their accounts. mPerks is a loyalty program through which Meijer customers can accumulate points to use as store credits.
During their investigation, officials found account login information and the points contained in those accounts were being marketed in encrypted chats and foreign online markets, Nessel said earlier this year. One seller, “Alphaland,” stood out in the number of sales being performed of mPerks in exchange for cryptocurrency and digital currency.
Alphaland, when tracked by investigators, was found to have more than 300 digital currency wallets using five different cryptocurrencies, but primarily using Bitcoin, Nessel said.
Officials tracked the seller’s activity to Mui’s home in Ottawa County. Mui allegedly cross-checked the login information with mPerks to determine how much each account obtained and then advertised the login information and account contents online.
Officials believe the information sold online was not obtained through a direct breach of Meijer’s system, but likely through an earlier largescale breach of separate software such as MyFitness Pal, which had 150 million accounts affected in a 2018 breach.
A software was likely used to analyze the data from the separate breach and crosscheck that stolen login information against other accounts, such as mPerks, that may have used the same username and password.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2024/07/16/mperks-theft-suspect-to-give-up-630k-in-cryptocurrency-cash-under-plea/74424175007/
