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$1.5 Million Bar-code Scheme Bilks Wal-Mart Stores
nomrniceguy writes "Two couples have been charged in a
price-switching scheme that allegedly defrauded Wal-Mart stores in 19 states of $1.5 million over the last decade.
Authorities said the scheme involved using a home computer to produce UPC bar codes for cheaper products and slipping them over the real codes on high-priced items. The suspects then allegedly sold the merchandise, or returned it for refunds or store gift cards that also were sold."
If they were rung up as lower priced items, then wouldn't it show the wrong items on the cash register/receipts? I don't understand how the cashiers didn't catch on. And how did they go about returning these items when the wrong items (and prices) were printed on the receipts?
I have done this at home depot on electrical and plumbing items but I use the upc's off other cheaper items.
Now with all the contreversy will they be safe once it all runs on RFID?
Or will we all be able to do the same just from outside the store ??
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
I saw the guys who did Re-code.com at 2600's 5th hope this summer in NYC. Basically you could create a barcode for any item, and print them.
Finally they closed down because of pressure from walmart and huge legal fees needed to fight them.
But they got their point across, so I could see someone doing this quite easily. Now I'm wondering how they got caught.
I think the best thing to do it go to a walmart and just sticker random items, so that random people are buying the altered items.
There's a 10 min video on Re-code.com about the case. It's worth a quick viewing.
Seems like a way to say "I didnt put the sticker there!"
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
I worked at a Wal-Mart for a while as a cashier. Our store had 4 self-checkout machines where you ring up the items yourself. One cashier was assigned to "Paystation" where people could pay with checks, and other assorted stuff the machines couldn't handle. When working at the Paystation, you were given a barcode card which when scanned would bring up an admin-like menu with price override options and other assorted "cashier" tasks. At one point, I scanned that barcode at my register, printed a receipt to show the number it represented, took that home and recreated it on my computer and printed a new version. I taped it on the back of my name tag, and it worked like a charm. Here's the scary thing: Cash Office also used a barcode for those machines to refund money, etc. They could literally empty the machine of cash with their card. If one took a picture of their card (which usually was worn around the neck in plain sight), it wouldn't be hard to recreate the bar code without knowing the numbers. Talk about fraud potential... I almost wanted to do it as a proof-of-concept, but thought that just being caught with the barcode would get me in big trouble, so I didn't end up trying.
"Enterprising" students would run them thru keypunch machines and make the number negative or add a decimal point.
These machines are also the origin of the "hanging chad". Always check your input. Like the state of Florida, Walmart could have caught this by auditing returns.
It's even simpler than that. One summer about 8 years ago when I was in high school, I sat down and decoded the UPCs of a few products in an afternoon. Once you know what the codes are, it's trivial to draw your own bar codes using MS Paint. You can then print them off using any old ink-jet printer. Don't believe me? This is the page that I wrote up after figuring it all out. I made the UPC graphics on that page using just Paint. I also printed off some test barcodes using the cheapo inkjet we had, and ran them by the "price checker" thingys in the local Target. They scanned no problem.
I've wondered for years whether it would really be that easy to get away with switching UPCs just like this. I guess the answer is "pretty easy." Of course, if you get as greedy as these people did, you're obviously going to get caught before too long.
Do not read this sig.
There is a usenet posting on this very subject from 1995.
I love that about walmart. It's because of that that I am a returning customer.
I remember when they tried to force me to use a TI graphing calculator in middle school. I used my HP for the most part, just as long as I had the TI with me the school didn't complain. But I've never had an item break as much as that TI, and each time it broke I just brough it back to Walmart. Seriously, a little bump on part of the screen and the thing would shatter. One broke when I slid the case on at an odd angle. Fuck you TI! I love you Walmart!
The pricing on the goods can be constituted as an offer. On accepting the offer, a contract is entered. The new pricing (bar code) can be viewed as a counter-offer. If the cashier accepts, the counter-offer is accepted and a contract is entered, making it a legal sale.
Of course, ethically it is wrong, but legally, it's not done yet.
the pun is mightier than the sword
This method is used to obtain competitive pricing all the time. For example, if Half Life 2 is going on sale at the beginning of the month, and Joe Retailer wants to know how much his competitors are going to charge:
Just print off the UPC code onto a sticker, and go into a competitor (like Walmart) a week before it goes on sale. Put the sticker onto another game, and ask the cashier for a price check. The scanner computer already has the pricing information in it, so the price that they are going to charge shows up on the register!
Back in the day to do this you needed Corel Draw (it had a neat little tool called the Corel BarCode) and a decent 24 pin dot matrix printer with a fresh ribbon and a pack of labels.
-- $G
walmart does not barcode their products, the manufacturer does, and UPC's do not encode any data other than error correction data for the UPC number, which serves as a unique identifier for each product, anything beyond that is done by the backend database.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Does this explain Wal-Marts big hurry to get RFID on all their products? These people got caught because they got greedy, and involved someone not quite as clever as themselves. Not quite as clever person got caught and squealed. I assume that there are quite a few clever, not so greedy people who have homes very nicely furnished and extremely low prices from Wal-Mart.
And where the hell did that 1.5 million come from? Did the crooks still have 1.5 million worth of stolen stuff in their home? Did the have a nice detailed spreadsheet of everything they'd ripped off since day one? Or did somebody at Wal-Mart just pull a number out of the air?
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
The return system would not be difficult to game at small scales, if you were untrustworthy. It's unfortunate, but true. The truly unfortunate fact is that a small set of people can game the system so much that companies are disuaded from offering returns, except as required by law, and making them as painful as possible. This has already happened, to a large extent, with data copies (software, music, and movies).
Though, the cash does display items using abreviations and other weird short forms to fit it on the line. I've seen items scan simply as "12 pack" or "toy", which isn't descriptive in the least.
Check this classic out from "The Devil's DP Dictionary", via the Linux fortune cookie program:-
curtation, n.:
The enforced compression of a string in the fixed-length field environment.
The problem of fitting extremely variable-length strings such as names, addresses, and item descriptions into fixed-length records is no trivial matter. Neglect of the subtle art of curtation has probably alienated more people than any other aspect of data processing. You order Mozart's "Don Giovanni" from your record club, and they invoice you $24.95 for MOZ DONG. The witless mapping of the sublime onto the ridiculous! Equally puzzling is the curtation that produces the same eight characters, THE BEST, whether you order "The Best of Wagner", "The Best of Schubert", or "The Best of the Turds". Similarly, wine lovers buying from computerized wineries twirl their glasses, check their delivery notes, and inform their friends, "A rather innocent, possibly overtruncated CAB SAUV 69 TAL." The squeezing of fruit into 10 columns has yielded such memorable obscenities as COX OR PIP. The examples cited are real, and the curtational methodology which produced them is still with us.
MOZ DONG n.
Curtation of Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte, as performed by the computerized billing ensemble of the Internat'l Preview Society, Great Neck (sic), N.Y.
-- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP Dictionary"
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I used to do the same sort of thing during my Questionable Youth.
Purchase C64 game cartridges at Target, take them home and unscrew the cartridge casing and remove the "guts" of the cartridge. Screw it back together and return everything except the guts for a refund... or a different cartridge. Sometimes, if I was bored with a game, I'd put the boring game cartridge guts into a case and return that.
So, someone would purchase "Jumpman" only to come home and plug in the cartridge to get "pinball" or something.
The unfortunate (for me) downside to all this was that it led steadily to more and grander schemes, eventually leading to a felony burglary conviction. The fortunate outcome was that I did Learn My Lesson (tm) and now I wouldn't consider stealing anything.
I look at most of those posts and think of them in the same sense as posts on how to make a nuclear bomb. There are actually a lot of people who have access to a large percentage of the material as well as the technical knowledge and resources necesary to construct one. You or I may not have ready access to fisionable materials in the quantities and purety necessary, but even if you or I did, that would not make it at all likely that we would create a nuclear bomb.
Do I have the resources to do UPC label creation and swaping. What I don't already have at home I can easily pick up at a local office max, or office Depot. Possibly even at the very stores mentioned in the article.
I look at the responses earlier in the listing as "Idiots, if you are going to do this, you need to do it this way..."
If I were to decide to use UPC relabling at Best Buy to get that great new 42" LCD HDTV, I would visit first, find a manufacture with both a 42" LCD HDTV, and a 35" LCD HDTV, write down the UPC for that 35" edition, go home print up an approprieate sized copy of that to overlay the UPC on the 42" edition, then during a busy time at Best Buy, go in, put the 42" set on a cart, go stand in line, and while waiting in line discreatly overlay the UPC.
Now note I began that with 'If I were to decide..' I honestly have no interest in doing this. I may like the idea of having a 42" LCD HDTV, but I happen to have worked for the stuff I own, and I have no interest in changing that.
I don't have a justification for such an action, as I have no interest in performing the action. That doesn't mean that I can't participate in the thought experiment, or write about what I know about the topic in question.
-Rusty
You never know...
Some people just don't give a fuck.
When your economy is crap and getting worse and inflation is out of control and you are discriminated against because you cannot buy pieces of paper that proove you can memorize you start to get desperate. Desperation leads to all sorts of things not normally done much less considered. Look at suicide bombers/attackers, they come from predominatly poor and historically impoverished areas and don't have much to look forward to. Never underestimate what a cornered animal will do, or one that is perceived they are cornered.
You see, there's this thing called the Social Contract. It isn't written anywhere, but we all ascribe to it, not because we want to, but because society would fall apart without it.
Of course, we are not perfect, so we bend the Contract on occasion. People do it by shoplifting, or pilfering, or swapping barcode labels. Companies do it by outsourcing, or denying valid insurance claims, or bullying employees into voting against unionization, just to name a few.
Our behavior is a natural consequence of our primal desire to get ahead by whatever means necessary. Without getting caught. That doesn't make it right, I know.
It's a war of sorts. A cold war, between producers and consumers. You can fight, or you can surrender, or you can continue the low-intensity conflict ad infinitum, which appears to be the choice of many consumers.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
I think the point they were trying to say is Wal-Mart has a bad karma. You may have noticed manufacturers now make one model they sell exclusively to one chain and another for other store(s) in the competing markets, I think Walmart is a major reason why. Wal-Mart has caused many people to lose their jobs and ironically not be able to afford to buy goods at other places that treat the workers better, so they have to shop at places like Walmart. Walmart forces manufacturers to sell the products at cheaper prices to them. An example is Huffy bikes used to be made in the USA and are now made in another country with cheaper labor.
Since Walmart is the biggest store chain in the country (USA) and has a presence in outside of the country, many manufacturers will cut corners and/or go for the cheaper labor costs in another country. Sadly, I hear manufacturing plants in China are now bringing in workers from Vietnam, because of the working conditions/wages aren't appealing to enough Chinese workers.
If I thought the displaced workers in the USA were being replaced by people who had a good chance to huge increase in better living conditions, it won't be a completely bad thing. People could get items for a cheaper price and someone in another country would have a better chance to buy things from a country with a much higher exchange rate. When you can support the little guys, who don't have the purchasing power of Walmart and you will do a better job keeping your community connected. A while back their was a story about Walmart putting in a Mega store in California that included groceries http://la.indymedia.org/news/2003/10/89674.php and http://www.valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?o id=oid:68043. All of the competing stores gave the workers health insurance (cashiers, stock people,...), but Walmart typically doesn't (the TV account). Also the news article said Walmart employees were more likely to be on public support while working at Walmart than other people in the community. A article from 2003 in Denver about Walmart not being good is at http://www.temple-news.com/news/2003/10/02/Opinion /Walmart.Rolling.Back.Prices.For.Welfare.Benefits- 511233.shtml