A Mountain Home couple has been arrested for stealing sports cards from retail stores and selling them online, and their daughter helped police with case. Thirty-seven-year-old Joshua Andrew Enquist and 37-year-old Samantha Michelle Enquist were arrested Wednesday following an investigation by the Mountain Home Police Department.
According to the probable cause affidavit, the couple would go into Walmart stores in Arkansas and Missouri, including in Mountain Home, Flippin, West Plains and Springfield, and skip-scan the cards. Investigators tell KTLO, Classic Hits and The Boot News, video evidence from the stores show the two sometimes holding several packages of cards together but scanning only one or holding a package of cards and a higher price box of cards together so they could scan the lower price pack of cards.
The couple did this over fifty separate times, including 26 times at the Mountain Home Walmart between Aug. 9 and Oct. 1. The total loss from the Mountain Home store alone is $1,434.
The couple then created an account on the collectible card app CollX, which allows users to catalog, appraise and sell cards. They also had a TikTok account where they posted videos of themselves opening and displaying the cards.
It was their daughter that helped law enforcement catch them. The female came to the police department last month to report possible stolen sports cards. She told investigators her mother asked her to come over.
She went to her parent’s house with a friend. When she arrived, her father loaded a box into her friend’s car. When she went into the house, her mother handed her a suitcase, and then upon going back outside, her father was loading more boxes in the car.
The daughter said her father told her to leave quickly and try to sell the cards. She reported she had just bailed her parents out of the Marion County Jail the day before on theft related charges and thought what was going was suspicious. She talked to an attorney who told her to go to the police department.
Both Joshua and Samantha Enquist are charged with organized retail theft and criminal use of property/laundering proceeds. Joshua is also being held on a revocation bench warrant for violating terms of his probation from an arrest on drug charges in Baxter County last year. Samantha is free after posting $5,000 bond. Joshua is still being held in the Baxter County Detention Center.
Organized retail theft is a newer charge in Arkansas where more than one person conspires to steal.
The two were arrested in Coffee County, Tennessee and extradited by the Baxter County Sheriff’s Office.
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