586 reasons to murder someone

No, this is not a listicle. It's a very interesting fraud case, that started with some unusual findings from a murder investigation.

A Bergen County (New Jersey) Police Department detective working the murder case of a Korean family found multiple sets of driver’s licenses and identities at the crime scene

Detectives, including some from the FBI, began looking more deeply, and found a massive fraud case.

The scam hinged on Social Security cards that had 586 in the prefix. These were legitimate documents issued in the 1990s mostly to Chinese nationals hired to work in American territories such as Guam and American Samoa. When the workers returned to China, criminals there bought the so-called 586 cards, knowing they might illegally profit from them.

The criminals gathered more than 20,000 of the second-hand cards and then found buyers for them throughout the United States.

Through a long process, the perpetrators used the 586 cards to establish excellent credit, and then used the resulting credit to run up bills of tens of thousands of dollars without paying.