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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 feel that it's actually very disgusting that people do this. It can ruin it for everyone by retailers getting burned by activities such as this and deciding not to accept returns or similar decisions. I think it's just a matter of time before many companies decide to allow exchanges only and prohibit returns. If they do adopt the policy of no returns and exchanges only, it should be explicitly signed at the point of sale so that everyone knows before they buy that they can exchange only and not return the products. Where are these peoples' moral compass?
There's no place like localhost
These crimes have the potential to seriously affect the service provided to genuine customers through store's return policies. Many people will use retailers who are known to be return friendly when buying goods they are unsure of so as to gain from that store's returns policy and be able to return the product if it does not meet their requirements. If returns policies are widely shaken up, it could be the end for easy customer returns, and the ability to legitimately return goods that do not fit your needs.
Business Voyeur
Its intresting to read about technologies involvement in stealing, and a lite overview of how these people do it. Though in the end its the same old story with a slightly new twist. As with everything the criminals and cops(or "good guys") are playing a game of constant evolution
I think the net of this article is that if you are Target Inc and track each recipt in a giant database - you'll be less likely to get ripped off.
snowulf.com
They need better item tracking through means that can't easily be forged. Such as, embedded serial numbers of various types or simply more competent employees to work the returns counter.
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.
According to the Nov 2002 National Retail Security Survey, almost 50% of all theft was committed by employees, not consumers.
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http://jrrobertssecurity.com/security-news/securi
No one loses inventory when you download music. If you shoplift a CD, then the store loses inventory. And you can't 'return' a downloaded audio file, so there's really no equivalent fraud. Is downloading unlisenced music wrong? Yes. Is it shoplifting? No. Copyright violation is immoral and illegal. It is not theft.
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..
That's some great personal ethics you have there.. basically helping yourself to an extended warranty. You are a common thief, nothing less, and deserve the same punishment as a shoplifer, as that is EXACTLY what you are doing. Your justifications are bullshit. It's time for you to decide whether you are an honest person, or a cockroach. So far, your actions have been that of a cockroach.
A gift card or a store credit is hardly a refund...
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
The CEO of Costco happens ot agree with you and employees are paid very well, given a good benefits package and so on. As a side effect Costco has a much lower turnover rate and employee theft rate than your average retail chain. They don't compensate with higher prices either.
And for all that, they still make a lot of money.
You'll never eliminate it, of course, some people are just greedy. Every person could live in luxury and there'd still be those who stole just to have more, but you are absolutly correct that when employees are paid for shit and treated like shit, they are much more prone to theft.
Compared to what some of the poor, victimized by evil customers (thank you best buy) retail stores do, the "rampant rise of fraud" pales.
/I think I hear the theme from "Schindlers List" being played, but it is really, really quiet.
Let's take a look at what some / virtually all of the stores do.
1. Blatantly and regularly violating in false advertising and bait and switch laws by claiming "oh, it was a price mistake that we don't have to honor that price."
Virtually every online store engages in such practices, although B&M stores are doing this more and more as well.
1a. Not applying sale prices at the cashier or overcharging the customer
2. Using rebate houses that don't honor / lose / just flat out destroy rebates. (CompUSA, TigerDirect, and pretty much everyone else)
3. Using rebate houses that don't pay on time. I've filed over $10,000 in rebates and I can count on one hand the number of rebates that came on time. It should not take 8 weeks for someone to cut you a check. Again, everyone who offers rebates engages in such behavior.
4. Selling extended warranties that are for the most part entirely useless. (My friend's laptop sitting on a kitchen counter started melting - proc overheated, motherboard got scorched and even some of the keys, and the chasis melted, Circuit City refused to honor the extended warranty because they claimed it was "Abuse")
4a. Claiming something is a "warranty", when in fact it is not. Read the fine print on some of these "warranties", have a laugh / cry.
4b. Training their salespeople to lie about the benefits of the "warranty". If some AG wants to file a suit, I know that Staples stores have a couple training CD-Roms lying around that clearly contradict the policies in the extended "warranties"
5. Getting around pricematch policies by ordering slightly different (yet identical in all features) models from the manufacturer. i.e. a HP PSC 950 and HP PSC 950xi. Perhaps not illegal, but a shady, shady practice that lets retail stores ignore their price match policies for many items.
6. (This is really devoted to my favorite, favorite store, Fry'ed Electronics). Labelling missing items as "containing all parts", even though many parts are missing. Then accusing the person trying to return a half empty box of theft.
Or throwing returns back onto the shelf without any indication that the product was returned or is missing parts. I'm sure this violates a whole bunch of laws, but hey...
7. Frys also gets the award for selling accessories that clearly won't work with the product that the customer has. i.e. the sales associates pushing SATA drives onto people who have only IDE controllers, Pentium processors for AMD motherboards, etc, etc.
Of course, every so often, the poor, helpless retail stores get caught and get - at most, a light slap on the wrist.
If you engage in clearly unethical business practices on all levels - from the very top to your store managers and even in the training materials that you give to your associates, you have as much right to complain as someone who paid a drug dealer with fake money and realized that they were sold orageno.
The fraud perpetrated onto the customer by these retail stores far exceeds any losses. Moreover, shady behaviour is encouraged by management and continues, even in the face of the occasional "Martha Stewart" FTC / BBB / "local / regional government agency that handles this sort of stuff" investigation.
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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.
I know that it is stupidly difficult to commit retail fraud at Staples. Trust me. Why? Our all-encompassing POS system. Transaction histories, the ability to dig out a past receipt (no more "I lost it, but here's the item"), and linked transaction numbers. That, combined with checking the returned products (no computers filled with potatoes) and so on, make it that much more difficult for lowlife thieves.
In the 6 months I have worked here, the only crime I have heard about was all physical. Taking the box and running, taking a product out of the box and sneaking it out, etc. Pretty much all of the crimes committed in our stores are posted around the district. There are not too many of these, thankfully.
The article also talks about returning products being counted as fraud. I have not seen any evidence of it here. Of course, we don't sell fancy clothes you just want to wear once or whatever, but we flaunt our "bring it back in 30 days for any reason" policy and it doesn't even matter if they are just trying it out. If it's in saleable condition, sell it. Otherwise, return it to the manufacturer as defective. I don't see any problem. It might be a problem with the smaller retailers, but most of them also don't have return policies like we do.
Time to go, a customer is approaching the service desk.
The correct procedure to have followed in this case would be to either pay for the extended warranty of buy a new Xbox.
Look at it this way: if you justify stealing from Walmart because a product is out of warranty and you didn't bother to buy an extended warranty then the logical continuation of this is that all "customers" would be justified in doing so.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
"Would you turn in a friend if he stole a 50 cent candy bar? A 500,000 check in an insurance scam? No then yes? At what point would you turn him in? At what monetary amount?"
Reminds me of the old saw:
A man asks a woman, "Would you sleep with me for one million dollars?" The woman thinks about it for a moment, smiles, and says, "Yes." The man then asks, "Then, would you sleep with me for one dollar?!" The woman immediately replies, "Absolutely not! What kind of a girl do you think I am?!?" The man says, "I've already established what kind of girl you are. Now we're haggling over the price."
An oldie but a goodie...
Don't like a place's actions? Don't buy there. You don't have the right to commit fraud.
Now, as to your actual points:
1. No reputable B&M store does this. They do make mistakes. They are legitimate mistakes.
2, 3. Rebates are offered by the manufacturer, not the store. Take it up with them.
4. Yeah, I'm sure you're right. I don't buy them.
5. That's part and parcel of pricematch policies. Places want to offer them, but they don't really want to get into price wars. Deal with it. If they didn't have these outs for the pricematch policies, they probably wouldn't offer them, so I don't think you're missing out on something anyway.
6. Fry's no longer puts returned stuff back on the shelf without labelling it as returned. Not because they are angels, but because they got remaed over it in the courts. Best Buy, on the other hand, still seems to do so. I personally don't generally buy these marked boxes, because of the hassles you mention. Now, on the other hand, the one time I did, I bought a $500 video card, when I decided to take it back (defective), the serial number on the card did not match the serial number on the box (not my fault). They had to get a manager, but did they accuse me of stealing? No.
7. That's a gray area, given that you can return anything you buy there, I don't see why this is a huge problem for the customer. And besides, don't buy crap you don't need.
I shop at Fry's a lot, and my experiences have been good in general. Returns are slow there, but partially that's because they allow you to return anything (a good thing in general) and people are there returning BS, like video cards they couldn't overclock enough. Or they are returning something they bought from Fry's just to keep for 3 days while the one they ordered from newegg at a lower price arrives.
In general, I have more problem with the other customers than the store.
But again, in the end, if you don't like the place, don't buy there. You don't get to commit fraud as some kind of vigilantism.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
(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.