Yupyupyup! This is an old (by internet standards scam), dating back to 2006:
It even has it’s own Wikipedia page!
Seems like they caught the guy by pulling camera footage from the Walmart he bought the phone card at. I wonder how long those tapes are retained?:
[quote]Using the records of the Panama City Walmart, which showed them the cash register and the time of purchase of the phone card, Mount Washington police were able to find surveillance camera footage of the purchaser of the card. The Massachusetts investigation had gone cold when their surveillance video failed to show the purchaser — the cameras had been trained on the store’s parking lot and not on the cash registers.[8]
The purchaser in the Panama City video was wearing a correctional officer’s uniform of the kind used by Corrections Corporation of America, a private security firm. Videos and still photographs from the two Walmarts were compared, and the same man was seen entering and exiting the Massachusetts Walmart at the time when a phone card was purchased there. Police used these images to produce front-and-back composite images of the suspect. Subsequent queries directed to the private security firm’s human resources department led to the identification of the phone card buyer as David R. Stewart, a married man with five children, who was then arrested.[/quote]
