Bust-Out Fraud ExamplesThe Live Anatomy of a Bust-Out Scheme
Newsworthy Examples of Bust-Out Schemes, Ripped Straight From the Headlines
Understanding the concept of bust-out fraud is a good start, but hearing about it in action can help you understand what the scam looks like in practice.
Bust-out scammers can cause financial institutions and merchants to lose thousands or even millions of dollars. Below, we share a few noteworthy examples.
From years-long cons to multi-million dollar frauds, this chapter explores a couple of the most notorious bust-out scams in recent memory.
Bust-Out Fraud
Scammers often look like legitimate cardholders... at least until they suddenly don’t. Take bust-out fraud, for instance. This happens when a scammer uses a synthetic identity to open up credit cards with issuing banks, build up a credit history, then max out the card and disappear.
San Diego Man Indicted in $2 Million Bust-Out Scam
In June 2025, 44-year-old Hasan Korkmaz was indicted on a total of 18 counts of “bank fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft.”
According to a press release by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California, Korkmaz ran a Santee, CA-based trucking company called San Diego Logistics Group Inc.
Between 2022 and 2023, Korkmaz “obtained names, dates of birth, social security numbers and other personally identifiable information corresponding with real individuals.” He then used this stolen personally identifying information to open up a number of “seemingly legitimate” credit cards, which he then used to make purchases, including “some charges as high as $18,500 in a single transaction.”
To cycle through his cards’ revolving credit limits, Korkmaz also made “fraudulent payments, with checks drawn on accounts with insufficient funds or drawn on non-existent accounts.” He then “laundered the bank fraud proceeds, including by transferring proceeds from the fraud scheme to a Turkish bank account [he] controlled.”
By the time he was caught for this bust-out scheme, Korkmaz had already caused over $2.1 million in losses for two separate banks. If convicted, he faces up to 30 years in prison.
Korean National Found Guilty of $273,800 Bust-Out Scam
In June 2023, Korean national Hee Soung Oh was convicted of both bank fraud and bank fraud conspiracy for his role in a “check kiting ‘bust out’ scheme,” in which he used synthetic identities to steal cash from financial institutions.
According to a press release by the IRS, Oh used an altered Korean passport to open numerous bank accounts, each with a small amount of cash. To appear legitimate, Oh let the accounts sit idle for a while.
An investigation by the IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) and the FBI revealed that the other co-conspirators then “wrote checks from a different bank account with non-sufficient funds, deposited those checks into the dormant account, and then withdrew cash from the dormant account before the checks cleared.”
Oh and other members of his fraud ring would “access funds by purchasing a money order and then deposit the money order into yet another bank account associated with the scheme.”
Although the scheme lasted for just nine months between January and September 2017, the bust-outs resulted in an actual loss of $273,800 to the banks, and a total intended loss of $466,318 based on additional, unsuccessful bust-out attempts.
He was sentenced to nearly three years in prison for the bust-out scam.
