A New York crime ring honed a very 21st-century scheme, gleaning stolen credit card numbers online from data thieves, using the numbers for a million-dollar Apple Store shopping spree, then boasted about it on Twitter.

The scam was so successful that one member branched off to start his own syndicate and the original ringleader taught his girlfriend how to keep the scheme going while he was in jail, authorities said. Arrests of the 27 suspects began this week and are. continuing.

The Brooklyn-based group compromised hundreds of accounts as members scooped up laptops, iPads, iPhones and other popular products at Apple Stores around the nation, from New York to Portland, Oregon, and from Orlando, Florida, to Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance and the US Secret Service said.

At the heart of the “S3” group was Shaheed Bilal (28), who enlisted his girlfriend Ophelia Alleyne, and his brothers Ali (23), Isaac (25), and Rahim (21), to help oversee the scheme, authorities allege.

“This was, in essence, a family affair,” Mr Vance said.

It eventually included more than a dozen people who were recruited to act as shoppers, several men accused of reselling the ill-gotten goods and a whole spin-off group, authorities said.

Shaheed and Ali Bilal and Alleyne (29), have pleaded not guilty to grand larceny and other charges and are being held on various bail amounts.

After buying the stolen account numbers through underground websites, the group stored the data in shared email accounts then printed fake Visa and MasterCard cards in the shoppers’ names, using equipment commercially available and intended for businesses that create magnetic keycards, authorities said.

The shoppers would then fan out to use the cards in Apple Stores in major cities such as Los Angeles, Atlanta, Las Vegas and St Louis, and smaller communities such as Short Hills, New Jersey, and Stamford, Connecticut, according to an indictment. The thieves sometimes charged more than €2,500 worth of products in one stop, but other transactions were as small as €40 for a laptop case, the indictment says.

Spokesmen for Visa and MasterCard said the companies recommended that merchants look carefully at cards and match signatures to customers’ names.

Apple, based in Cupertino, California, declined to comment on the case.

Shaheed and Isaac Bilal at point used the social networking site Twitter to trumpet an online video of themselves bragging about using forged credit cards at a restaurant, authorities said. Bilal’s Twitter accounts and the video have apparently been removed.

Shaheed Bilal was so enmeshed in the scheme that while jailed in an unrelated case from May to December 2010, he told Alleyne from prison how to run the scam, authorities said. And when Bilal was released, he got back into business with a new email handle: “rightbackonit,” authorities said.

Meanwhile, one of the men recruited as a shopper, Anthony Harper, split off in September to run the scam with a 10-person ring of his own that hit Apple Stores in locales including Washington DC, and Pittsburgh, prosecutors said. Harper (28), remains at large.

The two groups kept some of the merchandise but took the rest to men who bought it at below-market prices and resold it at a profit, authorities said.

Authorities say they seized three guns, a large amount of cash and bank accounts during the investigation.

“These crimes can move quickly from the web to the streets,” Mr Vance said.

AP