ATLANTA — Two women walked into police precincts around Atlanta, made presentations about insurance benefit packages to groups of officers and walked out with applications filled with personal information in a brazen fraud plot, police said Monday.

Cintia Ximena Pedone-Allou, 30, and Dawnetta Patrice Underwood, 23, both of Maryland, were arrested Friday after having visited multiple police precincts in Atlanta over the previous several days, police said. At least 39 officers and other employees filled out applications, and police believe the women may have also targeted transit police and fire stations.

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“Obviously, it’s pretty bold to go into a police precinct and target police officers for this,” Sgt. Paul Cooper said Monday. “Anybody can be fooled, and this is a good example. If they can get us, they can get anybody.”

A man who said he was the women’s supervisor would call the precinct and ask for the watch commander’s name, Cooper said. The man would then call that watch commander and ask if his benefits representatives were there yet. When the women arrived, they would give the desk officer the watch commander’s name and say the commander was expecting them. They would say they were from “employee benefits” and were there to sign people up for enhanced Aflac benefit packages and supplemental insurance and were then allowed to address officers gathered for roll call at the beginning of a shift.

“It was pretty detailed,” Cooper said of the scheme, “detailed enough to convince our officers it was legitimate.”

They targeted evening and early morning shifts, which start at 3 p.m. and 11 p.m., respectively, and police believe that may have been a strategy to avoid hours when human resources staff would have been available if officers or other employees had questions.

The scheme was uncovered when one lieutenant became suspicious because he said the presentation didn’t feel like a normal visit from Aflac, which provides the department’s insurance. The lieutenant kicked the women out of his precinct and contacted the personnel department. Personnel staff called Aflac and found that Aflac had no record of a relationship with the women or Employee Benefits, the Maryland-based company they said they worked for.

The women had left business cards and police reached a man who claimed to be their supervisor, who gave police the women’s cell phone numbers. Police arrested both women and recovered 39 applications. When questioned, the women were evasive and gave inconsistent and conflicting answers, police said.

It’s not entirely clear what the women planned to do with the information they gathered, Cooper said. He said it could be commission fraud, or they could be trying to submit false claims once they established policies or it could just be simple identity theft, he said. In any case, they misrepresented themselves and were not authorized to solicit that information from department employees, he said.

Police have contacted the state of Maryland and are trying to determine the status of the company Employee Benefits, which the women said was an independent insurance company. Police are also working to get information on the man who claimed to be the women’s supervisor and to possibly file charges against him as well.

The women were being held in the Fulton County jail Monday on $55,000 bond each, according to jail records. Police did not know whether they had lawyers.

Two brothers were sentenced today in U.S. District Court in Seattle to two years in prison for wire fraud in connection with their scheme to defraud Nordstrom of more than $1.4 million in commissions and rebates, announced U.S. Attorney Jenny A. Durkan. ANDREW S. CHIU, 29, of Anaheim, California, and ALLEN J. CHIU, 37, of Dallas, Texas, pleaded guilty in April 2012. The brothers devised a scheme to defraud Nordstrom after they had already been barred for purchasing any goods from the Nordstrom.com website. Because Nordstrom quickly notified law enforcement, the U.S. Attorney’s Office was able to seize more than $970,000 in illegally derived assets which will be applied toward the restitution owed to Nordstrom. U.S. District Judge Ricardo S. Martinez imposed the sentence.

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According to records filed in the case, in 2008 the CHIU brothers were barred from ordering merchandise from Nordstrom.com because of excessive claims for refunds based on representations that merchandise had never been delivered. However, both brothers continued to try to place orders with Nordstrom.com. Both men belonged to FatWallet, Inc., a membership-based shopping community website that promotes various online retailers by providing coupons and cash back incentives for purchases. FatWallet paid cash back rewards to the CHIU brothers for purchases made at various online retailers, including Nordstrom.com. In January 2010, the brothers discovered they could exploit a computer programming error in Nordstrom’s ordering system by placing orders that would ultimately be blocked by Nordstrom. No merchandise would ship and nothing would be charged to their credit card. However, Nordstrom would unknowingly continue to compensate FatWallet for the order, and the brothers would still receive the cash back credit from FatWallet. Between January 2010 and continuing through October 2011, the CHIU brothers collectively placed more than $23 million in fraudulent orders through Nordstrom.com. The fraudulent ordering resulted in Nordstrom paying $1.4 million in rebates and commissions, with more than $650,000 in fraudulent cash back payments going directly to the brothers. The error that permitted the continued payment of rebates in the ordering system has since been fixed.

In asking for the two-year prison term, prosecutors wrote to the court, “The actions of the Chiu brothers are equivalent to someone discovering that a back door to a Nordstrom store had been accidentally left open, and then walking in through that door to steal $1.4 million from the till… This was not a quick and hasty crime, done with any agonizing guilty conscience. The Chius methodically submitted orders, day after day, for nearly two years until they had ordered an eye-popping $24 million worth of merchandise. In order to try and avoid detection and suspicion, they had to constantly create new user names at FatWallet, and make sure not to order too much merchandise at once on any one user name. This was a crime committed in a calculating, careful manner over a long period of time.”

The case was investigated by the FBI. The case was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Katheryn Kim Frierson and Francis Franze-Nakamura.

For additional information, please contact Emily Langlie, Public Affairs Officer for the United States Attorney’s Office, at (206) 553-4110 or Emily.Langlie@USDOJ.Gov.