A man is accused of conning Home Depot of $300,000 by taking a bunch of doors without buying them, then getting refunds for them in store credit

• A 26-year-old man is accused of cheating Home Depot of $300,000 worth of store credit.
• He'd pretend to be a contractor, and took Andersen doors from 61 stores for free, prosecutors said.

A Connecticut man is accused of defrauding Home Depot of $300,000 in store credit by returning doors he never bought.

Alexandre Henrique Costa-Mota, 26, would pretend to be a contractor and collect Andersen doors from Home Depot stores across eight different states, the US Attorney's Office for the District of Rhode Island wrote on Wednesday.

Dressed as a contractor and carrying a black portfolio with a yellow measuring tape clipped to his pants, Costa-Mota visited 61 different stores between June 2021 to February 2022, investigators said, per court records seen by Insider.

Costa-Mota would take the doors and load them onto a lumber cart, said the Secret Service agent who investigated the case.

As part of his modus operandi, Costa-Mota would then walk to the store's service department to get the doors refunded, using fake driver's licenses or IDs with fake names to clear Home Depot's security checks, the agent said.

At times, Costa-Mota would first leave the store with the doors, then return later for the refunds, the agent added.

When some stores rejected Costa-Mota's receipt-less returns, he would just leave with the doors and go to another store to refund them, the agent said.

Costa-Mota received 370 store credits from his almost year-long scheme, which are valued at $297,332, officials said.

Prosecutors said some of the doors he stole were valued at around $350 to $400 each. Some Andersen doors can be sold for thousands of dollars at Home Depot.

Officials also said surveillance footage showed that Costa-Mota regularly wore the same pair of shoes and had a gold watch on his left wrist when retrieving and refunding the doors.

He is being charged with wire fraud and conspiracy, and has been detained without bail.

An attorney for Costa-Mota did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours.