paul isn t just any friend. who is paul desmond? paul desmond is my fiance. your fiance. reporter: angela says she met paul on the internet. he s even sent her this picture and asked to marry her. next thing you know, he said, let s get married. i really love you. i miss you. and it s mushy-mushy all the time. reporter: angela has picked out a wedding dress, and some of paul s merchandise has been shipped to her addressed as if they were already husband and wife. to angela desmond, his last name. reporter: it looks to us as if angela is a pawn in an international theft ring. but is she alone? clear across the country we make another undercover delivery to porterville, california. is this the correct address for paul williams? yes. reporter: to vicki beebout, another single mom. it s a package of electronics, ordered with a stolen credit card, from that online store we
turns out paul is engaged to two different women on opposite sides of the country. and who knows how many others in between. so why would international thieves want to trick women into accepting and reshipping so many packages? experts say it s because many american retailers refuse to ship overseas. so to collect their loot the identity thieves need a middleman, a so-called drop, somebody in the united states who can accept the delivery and then forward the stolen merchandise. that s apparently how people like vicki and angela are being used. we got some cardable sites. reporter: and if a thief doesn t already have a drop site, dan clements says it s easy to buy one in one of those criminal chat rooms. here i m saying, you want a valid credit card? give me a drop. reporter: in the thieves market, we negotiate to buy a drop address, where the criminals tell us we can send stolen merchandise.
actually charge lee or anyone else, but we did send out the merchandise north to track down the thieves. i even set up my own shipping company, ch delivery, and began fanning out across the country to deliver the loot. i hoped the deliveries would lead us right to the thieves doorsteps, but instead i met people like vicki beebout is this the correct address for paul williams? yes. and angela cater. both said they thought they were doing a favor for a man they met on the internet. let s get married. you know, i really love you. i miss you. and it s mushy-mushy all the time. but it turns out angela and vicki were talking to the same man, an international internet thief, using this picture and calling himself paul desmond, he has tricked them into accepting all this stuff and had asked them to forward it to his store overseas. and the more deliveries i made the more i heard about those mysterious stores.
i m sorry? you did receive it? all right, thank you very much. bye now. he had to go. by now it s clear we re going to have a tough time finding wendy and the thieves by tracking down a package after it s been delivered. but we want to get as close to the thieves as we can. so we decide to follow a package from the very start. i already boxed up the shoes and stuff. back in california vicki beebout has been collecting packages for her online boyfriend, paul. but now she realizes she s been scammed, too. and like jeff ball, vicki has agreed to work with us to track a shipment. paul still thinks he has her on the hook, so he s asking her to send another shipment. he s ordered this xbox from our online store, again with a stolen credit card.
created. and guess who the stuff s addressed to. a man named paul. this one is a xbox 360. now, does paul williams live here? no, right now he lives in london. but he s going to be coming here. he s going to be here in january. reporter: turns out vicki met her paul over the internet. and not surprisingly, he s been flooding her with packages too. all kinds of deliveries today. how are you? reporter: another one arrives while we re there. i have a package. reporter: vicki s gone a step further than just receiving packages. watches, shoes. reporter: she s actually been reshipping them overseas. in fact, we saw dhl picking up this one bound for africa. and when we asked vicki to show us a picture of her paul, we see a familiar face. and guess what? he wants to marry vicki, too.