October 14, 2016
A skilled con man born in Iran and reared in the United States has been arrested in Tennessee after he was caught shoplifting in a Walmart there. He had been on the run for more than a year from Minnesota, where he is sought on multiple charges.
Kamyar Farahan, 40, was accused three years ago of defrauding his own father by forging the deed to his father’s Minnesota home and selling it out from under his dad.
But in the past year, he seems to have made his living mainly by pulling sales receipts out of waste cans, then going to the shop, stealing the same kind of article for which he had a sales receipt, and then returning the article to get a cash refund.
He was arraigned last Monday in Rogersville, Tennessee, on charges that included the theft of the SUV he was driving, as well as shoplifting, criminal impersonation and being a fugitive from justice. He fled Minnesota after being charged there last year.
Police believe he was a one-man, multistate crime wave across the southeastern states.
Rogersville Police Officer Travis Fields told the Kingsport, Tennessee, Times News this was one of the more unusual cases he’s been involved with during his career.
Farahan has been moving around the Southeast in recent months posing as his brother. He had a valid North Carolina driver’s license in his brother’s name as well as a Homeland Security agent ID card, which has brought federal authorities to Rogersville to interview him—and which may result in federal charges.
Farahan was also found in possession of a police utility belt, handcuffs, police-style flashlight, and air pellet pistols that look like real handguns.
He also had the type of flip wallet that police officers use to hold their badges. Inside that wallet was a large pin that, upon quick glance, could be mistaken for a badge.
Farahan also had a large quantity of items in his vehicle that led Fields to believe he was a prolific con artist and thief. Among those items was a stack of blank checks. He also had personal IDs belonging to several people.
Farahan had hundreds of department store receipts, which Fields suspects were discarded by their original owners, found by Farahan, and used in his multistate shoplifting/refund scam.
Farahan is wanted in multiple jurisdictions in Minnesota. In one case from 2014, he allegedly stole the identity of an actual lawyer to file false lawsuits against mobile phone carrier Sprint.
Another Minnesota case alleges that in November 2013 he forged a deed to make it look as though his father had sold him a house. Farahan then resold that house for a profit of $62,000, all without his father’s knowledge.
Farahan also allegedly tried to con Progressive Insurance in January 2014 by claiming that he’d gotten car repairs done by a nonexistent auto shop and demanding the insurance company reimburse him thousands of dollars.
In 2005, he sued the Minneapolis Police Department saying he’d gotten into an altercation with officers about a month after the September 11 attacks. He accused the police of illegally stopping and searching his car in downtown Minneapolis, viciously beating him up, and calling him ethnic slurs like “rag head” and “towel head.” Police denied it, but the city eventually settled the lawsuit for $90,000.
Police say Farahan’s most common scam is posing as a lawyer. He has been in and out of jail over the past decade for fraud, assault, check forgery and identity theft.
He was arrested after receiving a $70 refund for a microwave he shoplifted from the Rogers-ville Walmart.
“He pushed a buggy into the store with a pillow in a Walmart bag and replaced the pillow with a microwave,” Fields said. “Then he used a receipt to get a $70 refund on that microwave. This was all seen by the store’s loss prevention officer, who tried to stop him on the way out of the store, but he just kept going.”
Farahan also allegedly shoplifted about $40 worth of clothing.
Police were immediately given a description of the black SUV with North Carolina tags that Farahan was driving. A traffic block halted the SUV. A computer check showed the SUV, valued at $20,000, had been stolen from Enterprise Rentals in Charlotte, North Carolina. Farahan was then arrested.
A week later, Farahan was still claiming to be his brother, but his true identity was revealed by the FBI fingerprint database, which showed him to have multiple felony fraud warrants in Minnesota.
“In my years in law enforcement, this is one of the weirdest cases I’ve dealt with,” Fields said. “He was very suspicious, and the more we talked to him, the more suspicious it got. It concerned us that he had a Homeland Security ID. We found a ton of other suspicious stuff in his vehicle, like blank checks, computers and a printer.”
Fields added, “He tried to say he owned a rug business. He had a lot of checks that were written out for $900 or $600. When we spoke to his former employer in Florida, they said they believe he passed several checks while he was there.”
Officers allegedly found hundreds of department store receipts in his vehicle from Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee.
Fields suspects Farahan has been going through store parking lots or garbage cans to find receipts and then stealing items to match the receipts so he can make fraudulent refunds.
“He was really good with his stories,” Fields said. “You could tell he probably encountered law enforcement before, and he had probably wiggled his way out of this before.”
Farahan’s former Florida employer stated that police there were investigating him, but upon being interviewed he was able to talk his way out of it.
Not long after that he fled Florida.
“What really had us concerned was it looked like he was really fixing to do some significant identify theft,” Fields added. “He had the computer, he had the printer, he had the information. If we hadn’t caught him, I’m afraid there were some people in Florida who were about to have some severe damage done to their credit, so I’m glad we were able to prevent that.
“I think since he was wanted in Minnesota, he just hit the road and was going to scam and steal, and get away with what he could for as long as he could.”