U.S. Secret Service agents executed a search warrant at a Jamaica warehouse on Wednesday afternoon, following the arrests of four Queens men and a Brooklyn resident after an indictment was unsealed in Brooklyn federal court on charges that they stole and resold more than $20 million in building and construction materials and appliances from home improvement and hardware stores in Queens, Brooklyn, Long Island and elsewhere.
Kai Xu, 44, Xiang Chen, 39, Songhal Lee, 35, and Kang Zhang, 30, all from Queens and Zhi Bin An, 56, of Brooklyn, were arraigned on a five-count indictment variously charging them with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, bank fraud, access device fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
“For these defendants, the tools of their trade were not hammers and nails, but fraud and deception,” U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Joseph Nocella said. “They enriched themselves by targeting programs designed for hard-working consumers and small businesses to buy materials for construction and home improvement.”
The five men were arraigned before U.S. Magistrate Judge Seth D. Eichenholz as the Secret Service agents were raiding the warehouse at 91-15 139th St. in Jamaica that was packed to capacity with stolen goods, according to a law enforcement source familiar with the operation. The seizure was expected to require multiple truckloads and several days to remove all of the stolen material from the Jamaica warehouse. The stolen goods were sold from several warehouses, most of them in Queens.
“Today’s arrests serve as a warning to those who try to profit from retail fraud: crime doesn’t pay,” Nocella said.
According to court filings, from July 2023 until September 2025, the defendants and their co-conspirators opened, or caused others acting at their direction to open, hundreds of lines of credit at hardware and home improvement stores made available to customers through the stores’ partner banks. These lines of credit included traditional consumer credit cards, which were designed for individual consumers’ personal use at the stores, and commercial lines of credit, which were aimed primarily for small businesses to purchase goods at the stores.
The five defendants opened many of these credit lines in the names of other people or on behalf of shell companies that had been recently founded or incorporated, were created in the names of straw owners and/or had no legitimate business operations. To increase the credit limits on their credit lines, the defendants presented proper checks to the stores under the guise of pre-funding the accounts or paying for past purchases. In reality, these checks were linked to bank accounts that had insufficient funds to cover the amounts printed on the checks. Before the checks were rejected, the defendants purchased significant amounts of building and construction materials for delivery to their warehouses.
In total, the defendants and their co-conspirators stole over $20 million in merchandise, much of which they resold to others. Profits from their scheme were then laundered to offshore bank accounts and used to finance the ongoing operations of their warehouses.
“Schemes like this don’t just affect retail corporations — they hurt consumers who rely on these programs to purchase trade supplies,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said. “I am thankful to the NYPD investigators, our federal partners at the United States Secret Service and HSI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for shutting this scam operation down and holding these fraudsters accountable.”
If convicted of the charges, the five defendants each face up to 30 years in federal prison.
“The Secret Service is proud to help disrupt an alleged criminal syndicate that carried out an elaborate fraud scheme here in New York City, siphoning off millions of dollars into its coffers through bad checks in order to procure construction-related materials for illegitimate resale,” Secret Service Special Agent in Charge Matt McCool said. “I want to congratulate our agents and our partners at both the Eastern District of New York and the NYPD for their hard work in holding these criminals accountable.”
