Slashdot Mirror
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. "
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
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..
a: a lot of consumer electronics stores have very limited return policies. compusa in particular charges 15% restocking on non-defective opened items.
I got frelled by this same policy at Circuit City.
Got my brother a scanner for xmas, turns out my mom got him a digital camera, so I went to exchange the scanner for camera go-alongs (bag, batteries, flash-cards, tripod, etc.)
When I went to return the item (unopened mind you) the guy opened the box, removed the scanner, cable, and software, inspected it for missing parts, then THREW THE BOX IN THE TRASH and only returned 85% of the price of the scanner to me on a gift card.
He explained that there is a 15% restocking fee on anything that's been opened. I stated that it had not been opened until he had done so (he had to undo a sticker over the flap of the box and tore off a few layers of the box in the process.)
When continued refusing to give me 100% credit then asked for a manager. He claimed he was "in charge." He didn't say he was a manager. I called his bluff, pulled out my cellphone, dialed 411, called the store, and asked for the manager. The guy promptly discovered a manager was available and summoned her.
She asked the kid of the box had been opened. He said yes. I said the kid opened it. She said he had to open it to make sure everything was being returned. She also refused to credit my sale 100%.
Out comes the cell phone again.
"411, city and state please."
"Sacramento California"
"What listing please."
"Attorney General's office, the department in charge of business practices." (GOD, I LOVE MY CELL PHONE AND ITS *SPEAKER PHONE* MODE.)
Before I got past the first layer of automated push button hell the manager agreed to give me a 100% credit to a gift card.
I folded my phone. I then told her that I no longer wished to do business with Circuit City and would like to have my credit card credited for the full refund and would buy camera-do-dads elsewhere.
When the first words out of her mouth were "Our policy is..." I unfolded the phone and hit redial.
She didn't finish the sentence and instead asked me for the card used to pay for the original transaction so she could credit the full price to me.
I hate to think how many people out there innocently get screwed by these places because they aren't the obnoxious stubborn bitch that I am.
She didn't agree to this until I
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.