Scammer Makes Seven Figures Buying Luxury Bags Online and Returning Chinese Fakes for Full Refunds

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After returning the well-made fakes, Smatsorabudh would sell the originals on eBay and Instagram for an average price of $2,000. She also kept original designer bags for herself, and when police officers raided her house, they found a whopping 572 handbags, both originals and knockoffs. T.J. Maxx was able to identify at least 226 fake handbags Smatsorabudh had returned over the last few years, and Neiman Marcus found 10 more, all of which amount to over $400,000 in damages.

Over the last two years, the scammer allegedly received more than a million dollars in refunds from T.J. Maxx alone, which doesn’t include the money she then made by selling the original bags online.

The alarm was raised when a T.J. Maxx staff member contacted the police about Smatsorabudh. She was arrested in June last year, after a Homeland Security officer posed as an online client and bought a bag from her. The investigation also revealed a 2014 email she had written to one of her Chinese knockoff providers. “The best fake bag I’ve ever seen! Can you send me more … from this factory. They make bag IMPaCABLE!!!!” (sic),” she wrote.

With so much evidence mounted against her, Praepitcha Smatsorabudh had no choice but to admit her crime. She plead guilty, and after being convicted of wire fraud, in December 2016, she said “What I did was so wrong, I deserve to be in jail.” Which is exactly where she will be spending the next 30 months. That’s not so bad, considering she was facing a maximum of 40 years behind bars. The federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, also ordered the woman to pay $403,250 in restitution to the stores she swindled.