A South Carolina man was sentenced on July 29 to one year and one month in prison for conspiracy to commit mail fraud, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Court documents state that Cody Cavallaro, 31, of Charleston, conspired between March 2022 and April 2025 to steal merchandise from online retailers by submitting fraudulent return requests. Cavallaro then received refunds and sold the stolen items on third-party platforms.
Prosecutors said Cavallaro placed hundreds of orders using false names, email addresses, telephone numbers, and variations of his delivery address—including adding non-existent floors to a two-story home—to evade loss-prevention systems. After receiving merchandise, Cavallaro and co-conspirators manipulated digital shipping labels provided by retailers so that empty envelopes were mailed instead of actual returns. Once scanned by carriers’ automated systems, these packages appeared as legitimate returns in tracking systems, triggering refunds without products being returned.
Cavallaro resold the merchandise on sites such as Amazon.com and Mercari.com while taking steps to conceal his activities. In late 2023, when contacted by an Amazon investigator about his source for goods sold on their platform, Cavallaro supplied a fabricated invoice totaling $74,998.50 from another retailer.
In September 2022, Amazon identified part of the scheme and issued charge backs totaling $117,447.62 against Cavallaro’s American Express card. He then filed a false fraud report with American Express, claiming those charge backs were unauthorized; American Express credited him the full amount back as a result.
According to court records presented at sentencing before U.S. District Judge David J. Novak, seven different retailers suffered actual losses totaling $768,127 due to Cavallaro’s actions; he also attempted but failed to fraudulently return goods worth an additional $586,577.62.