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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.
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
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.
(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.