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Retail Fraud on the Rise
prostoalex writes "They buy the merchandise, print their own receipts, and return it. They buy two watches - an expensive one and inexpensive one, and then swap them and return the one with the highest price. Business Week talks about retail scams, and how merchants are trying to avoid them without losing the customer service battle. They are fighting against surprisingly sophisticated techniques, too." From the article: "Q: What role do auction Web sites play in all this? A: Retailers have stopped giving cash back in many different cases. Instead, they do refunds in the form of gift cards or store credits or store value cards. If a crook can get enough of those, he might sell $2,500 worth of gift cards for $2,000 online. It's a benefit for the buyer, who gets a discount and will use those gift cards. And the person who has manipulated the return-scam system has a way to [make money]. But the retailers lose out. "
I had a friend that went and bought a Radeon 9800 XT when they were 450 bucks or around there. He then took it home and put his Geforce 4 MX440 back in the box and brought it back saying that "it was giving him Lines across the screen" They took it back and he got his 450 bucks back... Free upgrade for him....
I was so disgusted with him that i just stopped all contact with him. As soon as I heard that he did this (about 3 weeks after he did it) I went and reported him to the retail store he did it to. He was under 18 so he only got a slap on the wrist and ended up paying for it.
It just anoyed me that people do this. I run into it plenty of times in my line of work (Pro Audio) where people will buy speakers, you tell them how to set the settings, or better yet you set it up for them. Yet 2 days later they come in with Burned up Voice Coils and complaining that they were the WORST speakers they've ever bought, how they know more than me about pro audio and that it wasn't them. Yet by looking at the speaker you can tell it was overdriven.... Then go look at their equipment settings and they are not what you told them/set up for them. Yet they try and tell you they NEED a free replacement because these were obviously defective.... Sorry No dice. I don't play that game.
This is an issue of verification and item identity.
Possible solutions? How about identity tools such as image recognition, holographic barcodes on the item itself, RFID, etched serial numbers, etc.
if you are Target Inc and track each recipt in a giant database - you'll be less likely to get ripped off. Costco already does this... net result of which is you can buy things there and then take them back years later when the break, without a receipt. I'm just wondering how many times you can do this before they decide they no longer want you as a customer.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
(Self-disclosure: I only did it once, as a "proof-of-concept" test!)
Say I buy something (the last item I "returned" that way was a router): it works for a while, then quit working. When it happens before the usual 15 days return-without-questions-asked period, I usually go get another of the same item, swap with the bad one and return it the same day.
Why do I do that? you might think I'm a crook or something. Well, I'm tired of being shafted with some store's "10% restocking fee" (which is utter bullshit), or the incredibly ingenious ways of selling me stuff that never works right in the first place, then refusing to admit it's shit, or waiting for-bloody-ever for the thing to be fixed under warranty.
Some stores shaft me, I shaft them back. It's only fair. I don't do that with all stores, but CompUSA, Fry's and others, I have no qualms. Screw them.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
>Suddenly it's wrong when somebody's stealing from a store, but not when they're downloading it against the wishes of the author.
Yes, because stealing from a store is stealing.
Downloading against the author's wishes is copyright violation.
Suggesting copyright violation is stealing is like suggesting that being unable to pay your mortgage is stealing from the bank.
Society takes a hard line approach to stealing, but for crimes that are merely a breach of contract society often does not. Heck, in some US states the bank may be unable to even forclose on your house if you refuse to pay them -- the law protects *you*. That's because contract violation is never so cut and dried as "You had this and now it's mine and you'll never have it again". Just like free-pirate downloading-type copyright violation never deprives the author of ANYTHING they can prove the loss of. (You could only prove the loss of profits *if* someone actually paid money for the goods, since that money would have been yours if the goods were sold legally. Most pirate downloading doesn't involve money exchange, though.)
If you don't believe me, I do invite you to use a dictionary.
They need better item tracking through means that can't easily be forged. Such as, embedded serial numbers
Yes, so that when you buy a gallon of lighter fluid that purchase is stored in a database. Then when you buy a bag of fertilizer, that purchase goes into a database, too. Then the FBI decides to go hunting and says, "Hey Wal-Mart! Give us a list of everybody who's bought fertalizer and lighter fluid!" and under the Patriot Act they must hand it over and are legally bound not to tell anyone that they did.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
What's most interesting and ironic is I forsee many posts in this thread that object to the scams and support the retailers who are scammed and cheated out of their hard work and reward. However these same people will pirate (pick your favorite word) Windows XP, Adobe Photoshop, and so on, with no thought of the "large corporation". Hypocrisy runs rampant, and I'll admit I'm not immune to it, but surely it is worthy of reflection.
I mean, be honest: what is the difference? Printing receipts is bad, but downloading stuff from the Evil Empire is good? Or am I oversimplifying?
Oh and by the way: kudos on a well-done article summary. I wish they were all as informative and preserved the theme of the original article.
I don't condone stealing, but seriously it goes both ways. Consumers get constantly burned by mail in rebates.
Below chronicles the adventures of an employee I used to work with at a company I wish not to name. The company made Video Game products. We'll call the employee BT.
BT was employed in the department of the company that would test our products with various PC games. PC game manufacturers would send free games to test to make sure they worked with our brand of controllers, gamepads, etc. BT was basically the one and only guy to handle receiving these games. Most of the time we didn't care if they worked or not, we'd just get tons of games for free, and they started to accumulate behind BT.
One day he got the idea to take these shrinkwrapped games back to the local Best Buy for store credit. He would then take the store credit and buy stuff he wanted, or stuff to sell on eBay. Best Buy's return policy said if you didn't have a receipt, all you needed was your ID to return the product for store credit. BT started going to Best Buy daily returning 1, or 2 games at a time. He'd travel to various Best Buys within the area.
It was working so well, BT ran out of games to take back. You'd think he would have stopped, but I guess greed is just a too powerful force. BT started taking items from the Demo warehouse (a little local warehouse that had 10-20 items of each of the products we manufactured, controllers, memory cards for consoles, basically video game accessories). The policy at the company was it was okay to go back and take 1 or 2 things once in a while, even to take home to keep for personal use.
However BT started taking 3, 4, 5 things at a time, and took them to Best Buy to return as well. Eventually Best Buy caught on, and he had to get his wife, and close friends to go return things for him for a cut of the store credit.
When BT finally left the company, he had accumulated over 5,000 dollars worth of Best Buy store credit. He walked in, bought a laptop and a desktop computer and ended his career.
After that, half the staff of the company started doing the "Best Buy Trick", just on a much smaller scale..
Do you wait for him to rape or kill someone?
What if he steals from your neighbor?
I turned in a fellow student who was stealing expensive tools from people's cars and trucks. I didn't regret it then and I don't regret it now.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
if those speakers are so PRO, then why dont they have built in protector circuits and temperature monitors to prevent overheating?
Let me guess, made in china.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
On a few occasions recently I've had to return computer gear to a well known retailer. On each of these, there was nothing tehnically wrong with the product in question, just that it either didn't run in Linux or wasn't the piece I was looking for.
Specifically, there was an 802.11 card that was the same model but different version (therefore different chipset -- Broadcom instead of Prism) than indicated on the box, a sound card that just wouldn't work (my fault for not researching), and a graphics card that had a fan even though the picture on the box showed a heatsink.
Anyway, all three times, they accepted my explanation and let me exchange for what I wanted, but they never actualy opened the boxes and looked at what I had returned, at least not while I was there.
On top of that, I paid cash each time, and declined to give them my name and address.
The third time, when I was returning the video card, I was actually tempted to swap it for an older card -- I was pretty sure they wouldn't look, and they had no way to trace me.
Of course the temptation only lasted a few seconds; I am not a thief, and the deed I was considering is really, really slimy. All the same, it doesn't surprise me at all that other people do this.
My wife works in retail, and has truely wonderful stories about customer returns. One of my favorites is the one about someone who returned a chiped coffee cup that the shop hadn't had in stock for at least 10 years, but it had the store's name written on the bottom. And they granted the refund.
If I steal a Rolex and then return it with a fake receipt, they are not out the Rolex. Therefore, I would not be stealing.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
What kind of person potentially fucks up a kid's life and permanent record without at least trying to get him straightened out first?
Hey! It's not the OP fault that the "friend" commited fraud. Or are we not resonsible for our own actions anymore? If the "friend" can't hack the responsibility of his own actions he should GROW SOME FUCKING BACKBONE. Who are we to say that the "friend" wasn't fucking sombody else's (like the owner of the shop) life up by commiting the crime in the first place?
It's the fucks like this "friend" that make life harder for everybody else. I'm glad he was done in! And I bet your the kind of wimp that couldn't hack it either because "it's not my fault".
My guess is it took at least that long before they even noticed the problem. Figure it takes on average 3 months of use on the order of your use. Now consider that most people that buy treadmills use them for a week as a treadmill then convert them for use as a laundry drying rack.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I work at Sears and we try our best to prevent fraud and just last week someone came in and used a fraudulent credit card to buy $1600 worth in gift cards and sell them. The cards were reported to be used in NY and I'm in MA. So I think it's pretty bad.
Many of you may know of the Craftsman Lifetime Hand Tool Warranty where you can return any tool and get a replacement (even a new one) for free for your lifetime of course. Luckily people don't abuse this much but I don't doubt there have been times of course. You could easily grab one off the replacement section and get a new one to replace it with and then go to the register.
We changed our policy in February because of the "renting" population. People would come buy a new lawnmower in spring, return it in the winter and get a snowblower, and keep doing this.
Now we decline used merchandise with no receipt no matter what. There are also so many times when the best we can do is give a gift card because money is so different compared to a Sears gift card. Most of the time this is when the customer has no receipt, and certainly there are times when customers try to return things that they took off the shelf.
It's interesting how our loss prevention team is sort of buckling down now since it has gotten really bad in just last few weeks.
There was another time where people were manipulating for cash. These people came in, brought in big bills only, like 50s and 100s, and they made their moves fast, an example like this. One person came in with an 100, picked up a small item worth about $2, then went to the register to pay. It's not unusual for us to give $98+ change back although sometimes we need to call to get that money, but what happened was the person handed 100, and the cashier grabbed about $98 out of the register and handed it to this person. The person quickly grabbed another 100 and said "Now you have $200, give me ten 20's." The cashier got confused and we lost $100 but the kids were caught by the police and we probably got our money back.
The last example I can give is changing gift cards into money. So called customers actually have succeeded in this. They come to the store and buy something that's just a little over their maximum, pay with their gift card, and then whatever the difference is with cash. Then they mess with the receipt they get. They remove certain parts, one even told me that her kid ripped it up and she had to tape it. Her kid was right there was probably far uncapable of doing it so perfectly, as to rip the part where it says about cash used, and gift card used. So we almost gave her $100 but we found out, and we made her leave the store.
(many places only give employees 10% off, if that... It barely negates sales tax)
I know that one reason many big-box chains don't give larger employee discounts is that if they gave more than 10% they would actually lose money on many items. This is also the reason that Target, for instance, doesn't let you use a non-Target credit card in conjunction with your employee discount...the extra few percent they'd lose in CC fees would push many sales into losses for them.
I would never argue that they shouldn't pay more, though...I'm with you on that. Especially because while people won't generally work harder for a better employee discount, many people WILL work harder for more pay. So if they paid more, they would see some of that money returned to them in the form of better productivity.
Why is something like this labeled as insightful and not flame bait? Flat out saying that Christian morals are useless in teaching morality. What kind of slack jawed ignorant ass would say that anyway? There is no such thing as fear based Christianity. Those who argue there is have their own agendas or simply don't understand the religion. It teaches consequences for actions, self sacrifice, and allows for people to make their own decisions with the understanding that someone has already payed for the mistakes we will make as humans in our lives if we simply believe it to be.
You however, are arguing against the very fiber this country was built upon. This was a country founded on many of the core values of the Christian religion. It is the reason this country was so great for so long. Now you erode the value of this contribution diminishing the very values that made it so great and you want to say the cause for this downfall is "MCDonaldization". Get a clue, your the problem, get out of denial and see the forest for the trees.