Here’s a question: How do three illegal immigrants from Eastern Europe waltz into Texas and steal $14 million without anyone noticing for months?

The answer is as depressing as you’d expect. They just… did it. Every single day. For over half a year.

Kristians Petroviskis, Romunds Cubrevics, and Nurmunds Ulevicus — all Latvian citizens who had no legal right to be in this country — were arrested by the Texas Financial Crimes Intelligence Center last week. And what investigators found should make every American furious.

The Scam Is Stupidly Simple

These three guys hit about 10 stores per day, seven days a week, since May. That’s roughly 1,400 store visits over seven months. In broad daylight. Across Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and who knows where else.

Their method? They’d grab gift cards off store racks, carefully remove the packaging, peel back the material covering the card numbers, and record those numbers into monitoring software. Then they’d reseal everything so the cards looked brand new — no scratches, no signs of tampering — and put them right back on the shelf.

Then they’d wait.

The moment some unsuspecting grandmother bought one of those cards for her grandson’s birthday and loaded $100 onto it, these guys got an instant alert. Within minutes, they’d drain the money off the card and transfer it somewhere else.

The grandmother gives her grandson a worthless piece of plastic. The criminals walk away with the cash.

Multiply that by thousands of victims across multiple states, and you get $14 million in stolen funds.

Four Hundred Cards and Counting

When authorities finally caught up with these three, they found more than 400 gift cards on them. Four hundred. Just sitting in their possession, ready to be tampered with or already compromised and waiting for activation.

Think about how many people got ripped off by just those 400 cards alone. Birthday presents that turned into nothing. Christmas gifts that embarrassed the giver. Hard-earned money that vanished into the pockets of foreign criminals who shouldn’t have been here in the first place.

And that’s just what they were carrying when they got caught. How many thousands of cards did they process over seven months of daily operations?

The $14 million figure is probably conservative.

The Immigration Angle Nobody Wants to Discuss

Let’s address the elephant in the room: these weren’t American citizens running this scam. They weren’t even legal residents. They were illegal immigrants from Latvia who somehow made it into the United States and immediately set up a sophisticated fraud operation.

How did they get here? How long had they been here before they started stealing? Did anyone check their status at any point during the seven months they were hitting stores across Texas?

The Texas Financial Crimes Intelligence Center Director Adam Colby confirmed all three suspects were in the country illegally. Fox News reached out to ICE for comment on the case.

This arrest comes at a particularly awkward time for the “immigration isn’t a problem” crowd. Federal authorities just launched a massive investigation into daycare fraud in Minnesota — a scandal that may exceed $9 billion and is heavily tied to immigrant communities exploiting federal programs.

Pattern recognition isn’t racism. It’s common sense.

The Bigger Picture

Gift card fraud isn’t new. Criminals have been running variations of this scam for years. But the scale of this operation — and the brazenness of hitting 10 stores daily for seven straight months — tells you something important about the state of law enforcement in this country.

These guys weren’t criminal masterminds. They weren’t using cutting-edge technology. They were literally walking into retail stores, tampering with products on the shelves, and walking out. Over and over and over again.

Nobody stopped them. Nobody caught on. Nobody connected the dots until the Texas FCIC finally put the pieces together.

How many other crews are running the same playbook right now? How many illegal immigrants are exploiting America’s combination of porous borders and overwhelmed law enforcement to run fraud schemes in plain sight?

We don’t know. And that’s the scariest part.

What Happens Now

The three Latvians are charged with first-degree fraudulent possession of gift cards. Given their immigration status, they’ll likely face deportation proceedings on top of the criminal charges.

But here’s the real question: What happens to the victims?

That grandmother who bought a worthless gift card isn’t getting her money back. The store already processed the transaction. The criminals already drained the funds. The money is gone — probably overseas by now, laundered through a dozen different accounts.

$14 million in losses. Thousands of victims. And three guys who never should have been here in the first place.

Welcome to America in 2025, where the border is a suggestion and the consequences fall on everyone except the people responsible.