Last May, Gui Lin, a 41-year-old from China, pulled his car into the parking lot of an industrial complex in Derry, New Hampshire and began unloading boxes from his trunk.
A surveillance camera captured what happens next: A U-Haul van pulls up in front of Lin's car. Three men wielding knives and duct tape exit the van. There’s a struggle. Another man comes running from inside the building to try and help Lin, but the assailants slash at him. Lin then stumbles back into the frame of the video. He’s been stabbed in the chest and leg. The U-Haul drives off.
Lin was taken to a hospital, where he died that afternoon. His heart had been punctured.
From across the street, a neighbor named Lisa said she watched as police rushed to the scene that day. NHPR agreed to withhold Lisa's last name because she fears for her safety.
“There was a shoe in the parking lot. We thought someone got hit by a car, you know what I mean?” she said.
Lisa said there was caution tape up at the scene for a week, while investigators combed the area. There was news coverage of the stabbing, but authorities didn’t release a motive.
“I would imagine it would be money or drugs or something. Who the hell knows?” said Lisa.
But it wasn’t cash or illicit drugs that the thieves were after that day. Instead, something else drew them to a nondescript row of warehouse bays tucked behind a Shaw’s supermarket: the promise of millions of dollars' worth of Apple products.
The Derry warehouse where Lin was killed, authorities say, is one of more than a dozen facilities operating in New Hampshire that serve as a kind of way station for the unauthorized transfer of iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices. Inside, workers — who court documents say are Chinese nationals — receive, repackage, and export tens of thousands of electronics. The devices are purchased using proceeds from stolen gift cards, part of a “highly organized and sophisticated organized crime ring,” according to court records. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has warned that “card draining” schemes organized by Chinese criminal networks have taken hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly more.
The street value of the Apple products flowing through New Hampshire warehouses has given rise to other criminal activity: Along with the murder in Derry, there have been robbery attempts at other locations connected with the enterprise and at least one assault on an unsuspecting FedEx driver.
Hundreds, possibly thousands of Chinese nationals are involved in the broader operation, each playing a role in a multi-step scheme, according to law enforcement. And New Hampshire, authorities say, appears to be the epicenter of this global criminal operation for a simple reason: the state’s lack of a sales tax.
The scheme
The first step in the scheme is gift cards.
Here’s how investigators describe it: Chinese nationals go to retail stores – not just in New Hampshire, but around the country – and steal unopened gift cards for popular brands like Sephora and Lululemon off the shelves.
In a 2024 affidavit, Concord Detective Steven Carter explained what happens next: “The gift cards are then carefully removed from their packaging so that their card number, PIN number, and other identification can be recorded."
Then, according to Carter, the cards are carefully placed back in their original packaging, and are returned to the store’s shelves, where an unsuspecting customer will hopefully purchase them and add money to the card.
At that point, the card numbers are monitored remotely, often from China, so that when a grandmother or uncle in the U.S. puts $50 on the gift card, the thieves are notified and extract the money immediately, either uploading the funds into an Apple Wallet or using the gift cards to buy electronics.
The thieves aren’t always successful. In March 2024, at a Concord Walgreens, a clerk watched as a suspect grabbed gift cards off a shelf and fled the store. Video footage led police to a grey Chrysler minivan in a UPS parking lot. Inside the van, police found three cardboard boxes “stacked to the top” with thousands of stolen gift cards.
But other gift cards are successfully swiped and then placed back on store shelves, where customers unknowingly buy and load them with funds, providing the money for this international scheme.
How to protect yourself against gift card scams
If you've bought or plan to buy gift cards, here are some tips from the Federal Trade Commission:
- • Look over the gift card before buying it. Does the packaging look damaged or like it may have been opened previously? Is it missing protective stickers on the back? Is the PIN number visible? Those may be signs the card was tampered with.
- • Make a copy of the card, and hold onto your store receipt just in case.
- • If you suspect money has been stolen from your gift card, call or go online to the company associated with the card to submit a fraud claim. The FTC has more instructions for how to contact popular retailers.
The purchases
The money moves quickly.
Apple products may be purchased with up to a dozen different stolen gift card numbers. Each phone, or sometimes an Apple Watch or iPad, is purchased using a fabricated name, but the products are shipped to specific warehouses in New Hampshire, which has no sales tax.
“It allows more products to be purchased without losing, you know, profit to taxes,” Carter, the Concord detective, recently testified.
The scale of the scheme is mind-boggling: Apple, working with police, determined that the company shipped 46,364 products to a single warehouse in Windham, New Hampshire during a 10-week window last summer, with a total value of $47 million. That works out to an average of $600,000 a day in Apple products to a single location. A separate facility in Amherst received another $35 million in iPhones over the same period.
Police have identified at least 13 different facilities in New Hampshire, including in Windham, Seabrook, Londonderry, Jaffrey, Hampstead, and Amherst. And it’s inside these warehouses that the third part of this scheme happens.
The repackaging
Chinese nationals are working and, in some cases, living inside these rented warehouses. There, workers receive the new Apple products from UPS or FedEx, sometimes thousands a day. They unbox the products, then consolidate all of the electronics into larger, anonymous brown boxes. During raids, authorities have found handwritten ledgers and online chat messages used to keep track of each individual device. According to court records, workers are paid between $5 and $10 per phone they repackage.
The amount of cardboard packaging quickly piles up.
“That was a problem, yeah, of course,” a man who rented a neighboring unit within an industrial complex in Seabrook said. NHPR agreed to withhold his name because he fears for his safety.
He said the amount of cardboard that warehouse workers were going through filled up the dumpsters to the point where no other tenants could use them.
“I feel like they got bold at some point and started scaling,” he said.
Authorities on a stakeout reported watching a Tesla Cybertruck with New Hampshire license plates get filled with flattened boxes, which then were taken to the Seabrook dump.
Once the electronics are repackaged into unmarked boxes, the warehouse workers go to UPS or FedEx to ship them to their next destination. Often, that’s to an international exporter based in Florida. From there, it's on to China, Dubai, or South America, where the iPhones and other devices are resold for profit.
With so many steps, and so many people involved, there appears to be no central ring leader, and no shortage of proceeds to share.
“All parties involved throughout this cycle, including the initial fraudsters, the gift card dealers, the merchandise re-shippers, and the gray-market importers, profit along the way,” a New Hampshire detective wrote in court paperwork.
The arrests
The first crack in this case appears to have come a few days after Christmas 2023. A person from Hoover, Alabama contacted New Hampshire police, claiming a gift card they’d purchased had just been used at a Concord Walmart — about 1,200 miles away.
Police traced the transaction to a man named Mingdong Chen, who led authorities to an apartment in Nashua. Inside, they found $30,000 in cash and large quantities of Apple products. While police were at the apartment that day, a UPS driver happened to pull up, delivering more packages.
Court records show police also found paperwork referencing a warehouse in Salem. A search of that facility yielded some 4,000 iPhones and other electronics with an estimated value of $8 to $9 million.
Since that first bust, the Department of Homeland Security has partnered with multiple police agencies in New Hampshire to stage arrests. At least 19 people have been charged in New Hampshire to date, according to an analysis by NHPR, though it isn’t clear if that is an exhaustive list. The Department of Homeland Security and detectives in Concord and Seabrook did not respond to requests for comment.
“We remain committed to dismantling every link in the fraud supply chain,” the acting U.S. Attorney for New Hampshire said in April 2025, following the arrest and sentencing of three members of the operation.
The criminal cases are playing out across different court rooms, before different judges. Translators, either in person or through Zoom, help the defendants follow the proceedings. Some of the alleged conspirators are out on bail, while others charged with nearly identical crimes have been held pretrial for more than two years.
At one hearing, Carter, the Concord detective, took the stand for more than an hour, walking a judge through each step of the scheme, including why New Hampshire’s lack of a sales tax is drawing thieves to the state, allowing them to save on the cost of the initial purchase of the Apple products. Carter said he thinks there may be hundreds, possibly thousands of people involved in the enterprise internationally.
“With all of the circumstances combined, every person plays a role in this scheme,” he said. “One person can be the person loading the gift cards, making the purchases, arranging the shipping. Everyone plays their part.”
The defense
Of the 19 workers arrested, at least three have been accused of wire fraud for stealing gift cards and have pleaded guilty, leading to jail sentences and, for some, deportation.
At least nine of the warehouse workers have been accused of receiving stolen property. This is where some defense attorneys see a problem – or maybe an opening.
“Isn't it true at this time that out of all the Apple products you've seized, none of those Apple products have been reported stolen by Apple?” John Dennehy, an attorney representing some of the warehouse workers, asked Carter at a recent hearing.
“No,” the detective replied, confirming that the company had not reported the electronics as stolen. Apple is getting paid for the devices the alleged scammers are buying. The gift cards are stolen, but that’s not what many of these defendants are accused of. In fact, it isn’t clear what these individual warehouse workers may know about their role in the wider schemes.
“I think he was doing everything in his power to make it legitimate,” Mingli Chen, an attorney representing a warehouse worker, Yi Sun, told NHPR. “He didn’t realize, didn’t know something odd. He was just a normal worker, hired by the employer.”
According to his charging documents, Sun allegedly helped operate two warehouses in Seabrook, including the facility where the Cybertruck made dump runs to dispose of the cardboard. Chen called his client “naive” about the ins and outs of the operation. Last week, county prosecutors dropped the charges against Sun, after they were unable to work with federal agents to turn over evidence in the case.
Apple declined to comment for this story. It's possible the company may not have initially noticed the purchases, given the shipments to the assorted New Hampshire addresses constitute a small fraction of its $416 billion in sales last fiscal year. Still, it isn’t clear what steps the company may be taking to root out these transactions.
The fallout
With tens of millions of dollars' worth of Apple products moving through New Hampshire, people are going to talk. The iPhones have become repeated targets of theft.
According to court records, a FedEx driver was shoved to the ground while she was delivering phones to a Manchester warehouse in early 2025. A UPS facility in Nashua was robbed at midnight a few months later; 600 iPhones were taken.
There was a robbery and shootout in Sweetwater, Florida where men wearing Michael Myers masks from the movie "Halloween" made off with an unknown number of phones inside a box with a New Hampshire return address.
In April 2025, five men traveled from New York to break into a warehouse in Londonderry. They zip-tied an employee and demanded to know where the phones were. Turns out, the men were in the wrong storage unit; the phones were next door. Instead, they made off with designer clothes and purses.
One of those alleged robbers, Marco Junior Marquez Vera, a 20-year-old from Queens, is accused of returning to New Hampshire the following month to try again.
This time, he allegedly hit a warehouse in Derry. He came with accomplices wielding knives and duct tape. Vera is accused of killing Gui Lin, the 41-year-old warehouse worker, in the parking lot. Two other men were also arrested, while authorities are still searching for at least four other people who traveled to New Hampshire that day, including the getaway driver.
Within days of the killing, Vera boarded a plane for Iceland, then made his way to Madrid, Spain where, last August, he was arrested. He’s been extradited, and now awaits trial in New Hampshire.
