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Barcode Scam Redux - Target's $4.99 iPod
abscondment writes "Nearly a year ago, two couples were charged with scamming WalMart for nearly $1.5 Million by creating custom barcodes with reduced prices. You'd think that in the intervening months, other companies would guard against such shenanigans - but today we see that Target just caught a scammer buying iPods for $4.99! The 19 year old used BarCode Magic to create fake barcodes, buying expensive electronics suspiciously low prices. Personally, I would have gone for a less blatant discount, or refrained from visiting the same store so soon afterwards."
Of course, we only hear about the ones stupid enough to get caught. I wonder what percentage of people attempting barcode scams aren't caught (or publicized, to save the store embarrassment). Similarly, I wonder if stories like this increase or reduce the number of people trying these scams...
-JMP
I wonder if anyone has tried the target in my town yet...
Ouch, ... that's gonna leave a mark...
It's a bit obvious when the iPod you are about to buy rings up as a packet of Salt'n'Vinegar Crisps
Personally, I would have gone for a less blatant discount, or refrained from visiting the same store so soon afterwards.
Personally, I would have been honest.
Sony ha
"Personally, I would have gone for a less blatant discount, or refrained from visiting the same store so soon afterwards." Personally, I wouldn't steal said iPods in the first place.
The best part of this story is the whining by the guy who was busted. What a bitch!
"I will NEVER EVER DO THIS EVER AGAIN and I am once more terribly sorry," Baldino wrote in a statement for police. "Please let me go for I am terribly sorry!!! I'm only a kid! Help me out. I just want to go home. I did this not knowing of the serious penalty that lies behind it. Please! Please! Please!"
"I am extremely sad now, and I just want to go to bed," he wrote. "Please let me sleep in my own bed tonight."
Too bad, pansy. Do the crime, do the time. God I hope this guy gets raped by a big black guy named Bubba. Fucking college weenies.
A few weeks ago someone screwed up at a gas station and the Premium gas was $.239 instead of $2.39. This was an attendants fault.
Purple, because ice cream has no bones.
$4.99 for a $150 Ipod? And why didn't the cashier notice? Of course, he tries to do it again, but the article doesn't say if it's the same Target. If it is, what a moron. Go to a different store (if you're so ethically declined).
You think they would have learned from the lego guys getting caught:
0 6&tid=159&tid=133&tid=1
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/28/04362
Oh. Well, in that case, off you go.
You'd think that in the intervening months, other companies would guard against such shenanigans
They're working on it. It's called RFID. Soon only people with tinfoil hats will be able to shoplift.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
Nice moderating - Flamebait, troll? Come on, the guy's got a good point.
slashdot has turned into the master of OFN. any asshole sysadmin who websurfs could do a better job than you pricks
What happened to "Personally, I would have not considered committing fraud in the first place"?
"I will NEVER EVER DO THIS EVER AGAIN and I am once more terribly sorry," Baldino wrote in a statement for police. "Please let me go for I am terribly sorry!!! I'm only a kid! Help me out. I just want to go home. I did this not knowing of the serious penalty that lies behind it. Please! Please! Please!"
Hey, kid...out in the real world, there are real world consequences. Your mom is not there to pick up the pieces.
The most laughable thing has got to be that the kid is pleading ignorance to the severity of his actions. Anyone with half a brain is going to realise that undercutting retailers by 100s of dollers is blatently stealing. To be honest though, I guess you have to be pretty daft to keep going back to the same place. 'I'm just a kid', give over, you're 19 son, grow up and accept your punishment!
"I will NEVER EVER DO THIS EVER AGAIN and I am once more terribly sorry," Baldino wrote in a statement for police. "Please let me go for I am terribly sorry!!! I'm only a kid! Help me out. I just want to go home. I did this not knowing of the serious penalty that lies behind it. Please! Please! Please!"
I'm guessing he has a MySpace account.
...is there an Open Source equivalent of Barcode Magic that runs under Linux?
I almost felt sorry for the poor broke kid until I realized that he is buying expensive electronics. An iPod is not necessary to survive unless you're not "cool" enough.
i saw this ten+ years ago when i worked for target. the trick then was to cut off a UPC for a procuct who's 8 character or whatever description was along the same lines of the thing you wanted to buy. tape it to the box of what you really wanted, and most cashiers wouldn't bother to look.
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
Personally, I would have been honest.
Personally, I can understand hypotheticals.
You learned about them before kindergarten, its called "make-believe."
...are usually the employees.
I knew a kid who worked at a Best Buy with a bunch of his friends. They all were caught months later running a register scam. They'd ring up a friend who bought maybe 6 CDs, a VCR and a TV. They'd "forget" to scan the TV, and the friend would roll right out with the helper employee (another scammer) and put the TV in a car. They did this for months and finally got caught.
Another scammer I met (who didn't do jail time) used to be in charge of returns. He would check returns for completeness, put it back together, reshrink wrap the item and stick it back on the floor. Oh, he also threw other expensive items in the box. His friend would come, buy the $19.99 big box radio, and walk out with hundreds of items. Since the item was shrink wrapped, no one caught on for months.
I thought of the barcode scan YEARS ago when I found a barcode scanner at a garage sale. This is pre-USB days. I messed with barcodes for weeks, and figured one could print barcodes onto a label and stick it on a box. I never did it (even though I am an anarchocapitalist and anti-government/anti-mercantilism, I would never steal), but I can't believe it took this long for stores to see the problem.
The solution is one-time use barcodes. It isn't as bad as you'd think for the big box stores. When a skid is received, it has two barcodes on the packing list: first code, last code. The employee scans both (say 1111183.17 and 1111183.234) and the system registers all the item codes and the unique codes. If the register scans a duplicate, there's a problem.
The other solution is already in place in Home Depot and grocery stores -- the self checkout. You can't buy an item without weighing it. I believe Best Buy and Circuit City are already starting to work on incorporating scale barcode scanners that weigh the item when they scan it.
I've considered starting a security company for ma-and-pa stores to battle these forms of theft. There are many ways a store can protect itself, but the best way is to have intelligent staff who aren't helping the thieves. Good luck there.
In a follow-up statement to police, he wrote: "I am extremely sad now, and I just want to go to bed," he wrote. "Please let me sleep in my own bed tonight."
Well if you put it that way, sure, hop right out of jail and into your comfy bed.
$10 says Jonathan Baldino is a marketing excutive at barcode magic ;)
This reminds me of my days as a pizza restaurant shift manager. A customer who thought he was brilliant cut out one of our logos from an ad and taped it onto a competitor's coupon. The delivery driver didn't recognize the coupon, and when he saw the tape he peeled it off in front of the customer who, of course, pleaded ignorance.
to make my barcode with something that would ring up $100,000, just for kicks
Chilldafuckout. Geeks (in the Jon Katz sense) can't resist an optimization problem. It's not an ethical issue... just another abstraction in a life that's probably filled with abstractions. Just because I think, Suppose I were an iPod thief... what's the best way for me to balance the risk/reward equation? doesn't mean I don't respect property rights, or that I'm even remotely likely to steal anything in the real world.
It's people like him who ruin the system for the rest of us.
I was in the grocery store today and noticed tons of products with switched bar codes. I've been thinking about the whole thing because it's been happening at our record store a lot more than it used to. I don't know whether people are more broke or just more inclined to try it since cashiers just scan everything through absent-mindedly.
If mom is Barbara Bush, you can fuck up everything you've ever done in life and never have to deal with the "real world", because Daddy can just buy you a new corporate, state, or federal job. In the words of Ambrose Bierce, "Wealth n. Impunity."
I can get an iRiver for $4.75 and it does OGG as well!
On the old days ........ people only take the items out of the store in "low tech means" also changeing the tags in where barcodes where a dream but what can i wonder now... in todays hightech world. The robber brings the fight to the TAG... Scan and barcodeless. And what about the get away... just thinking than a laser printer will hide your tracks .... he is wrong. Security cams, guards, more trained employes.., and smart chips will keep us good custumers safe, paying the right price and not takeing the charge and loses of crime.
We at Target would like to thank all of you for publicize this story, but more importantly helping us stop these scams by turning Barcode Magic's web server into a pile molten metal. As you are all surely aware, a site that allows users to print up barcodes is up to no good and deserve to be "Slashdotted", to use the common parlance of our times. We thank you for your vigilante justice. Consider it as a service to all the shoppers at Target. The prevention of future scams will result in savings passed onto the our shoppers, and not into the pocket of our executives.
Sincerely, Target "Walmart, without all the Lower Class"
EvilCON - Made Famous by
TFA reads basically as a step-by-step guide to teach any-and-everyone how to (at least attempt to) pull off a similar barcode scam. From the googling for the name of the barcode software, to outlining his method for affixing the faux-UPCs to the box and then looking for relatively ignorant checkout cashiers to use...this article explains it all. Hell, it even mentions that the 'Barcode Magic' software has a 15-day free trial. My quetions: (1) How in the hell is that relevant to the article? and (2) How many kiddies are now going to read this, download the software, and start perpetrating their own scams? Sheesh...
"I will NEVER EVER DO THIS EVER AGAIN and I am once more terribly sorry," Baldino wrote in a statement for police. "Please let me go for I am terribly sorry!!! I'm only a kid! Help me out. I just want to go home. I did this not knowing of the serious penalty that lies behind it. Please! Please! Please!"
What a spoiled little punk. He didn't know stealing was against the law? He was old enough to come up with this scam and steal, and now suddenly he's just an innocent kid?
I say they give him the chair.
No, but seriously, the attitude of this kid sickens me. Do the crime, get ready to do the time. At 19, you're a little old to be whining like an adolescent.
Personally, I can understand hypotheticals.
Apparently not. The submitter's statement was -- to paraphrase in order to highlight the hypothetical even more blatently:
Had I been in this kid's shoes, I would have committed the same crime in a different way which would have resulted in a higher probability of not getting caught.
I replied that had I been in his shoes, I would have not committed a crime at all -- an additional hypothetical.
There were a few hypotheticals in there, you missed at least one. Back to kindergarden for you!
Sony ha
That is how the world works now. Its all about 'how can we scam someone'.
Welcome to the 21st century.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
From the article, here's his statement to the police:
"I will NEVER EVER DO THIS EVER AGAIN and I am once more terribly sorry," Baldino wrote in a statement for police. "Please let me go for I am terribly sorry!!! I'm only a kid! Help me out. I just want to go home. I did this not knowing of the serious penalty that lies behind it. Please! Please! Please!"
Cripes, if you're 19 years old you are a) not a kid, and b) should realize that it's not the penalty that makes an action wrong, it's the action itself
>>Go to a different store (if you're so ethically declined).
Might be better written as "Go to a different store if you are so unethically inclined."
[/nazi]
Isaiah 43:19 (NCV)
Look at the new thing I am going to do. It is already happening. Don't you see it?
He should have asked Santa. That way, it's free and he won't be on Santa's "naughty" list.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Way back in the beginning of the Internet (Yes, kiddies, there was such a time) a man known only as +ORC wrote about 'codebaring' as he called it. He also spoke about the supermarket enslavement as to why supermarkets force you to go both counterclockwise and why they put all sorts of greenery and colours right when you enter.
_ other_data_formats/161810.html
His name- +ORC. To this day no one knows who he was, but his faithful servant, +Fravia, kept his vigil for a number of years. When Anon.penet.fi went down he melted away.
http://www.totse.com/en/hack/magnetic_stripes_and
http://www.woodmann.com/fravia/orc.htm
I metamod Redundants unfair for this very reason. The Slashdot moderation system is seriously broken.
It might not be quite as fancy, but there's a free and OSS PHP-based barcode maker called Barcode (which does work, and pretty well). I've used it in the past to steal^Wcreate barcodes for inventory at work.
Here's an implementation and here's the homepage for the program.
An interesting aside is that if you have an LCD monitor, you can actually scan the barcode off the screen (at least with an older Symbol RS232 scanner I had).
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
That's very easy to mistakenly do with the way gas station prices work. I used to work at one, and the manager did that accidentally. I forget exactly what the price was supposed to be, something like $1.79. Anyway, the console used to do that didn't have a decimal point, and the price is always something like $1.799. So you have to type 1799 on the keypad to get the right price. She accidentally put in 179 instead of 1799, so the price became $0.179. We caught the mistake after the first person got gas after that. I'd believe that it was an honest mistake as opposed to a crooked employee.
I worked at Fry's, and was actually lucky enough to catch somebody doing this trick. I say lucky because, besides for other draconian security measures in place at Fry's is a $50 bonus for catching someone shoplifting ($300 if it was an employee). Anyway, these scams are particularly clever because it requires very little in the form of "suspicious behavior" from the customer. All they have to do is put the package in the cart with the barcode up and casually place the sticker on it. Furthermore, since you can pretty much generate whatever you want on that, it can be difficult for the cashier to notice it, because the product could ring up as an item very similiar. For instance, the trick goes to purchase an iPod case for $10 and then take home the barcode and fiddle with it until you make a sticker with the same info on it. It rings up to the cashier as "iPod" something, and it takes a rather observant cashier to notice this. Very clever, indeed.
The only reason I caught him was because I noticed he kept peeling something off of the box, which was suspicious. Apparently, he had f'ed up the first sticker's application, and it was crooked, a dead giveaway.
The self-checkout is not even close to fool-proof. If anything it's way easier to fool. I find they get confused at the slightest change in weight in your bag. You could easily scan a cheap item place it in the bag and then take the item out. When the machine starts yelling at you to put the item back in the bag you could easily put a more expensive item in instead. The key with all this is that slow, cautious clerks bring down theft. The more it's automated, the more nobody knows what's happening to the merchandise.
It's not leet until you use a felt tip too modify the actual bar code. Fuck this printed sticker shit.
The customer might have been ignorant. There are dirt bags who sell "discount" coupons, much like gift checks to the unwary. It sounds like a good deal for everyone, except the vouchers are little more than coppies made with some image manipulation program. The scam is prevalent in college towns with foreign students.
Other pranks have been committed like this without a profit motive. There have been several cases of people making bogus coupons and emailing them as chain spam. Store clerks often take them without knowing any better.
The silly world of coupons, gift cards and other marketing ploys invites this kind of abuse. That's why they are a stupid idea to begin with. An honest price well advertised is a better deal.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I don't see what the big deal is. A five year old could so this. In fact, as a five year old 23 years ago - I *DID* do this.
I wanted one toy really bad and knew my mom wouldn't buy it for me, so I switched the price (it wasn't a barcode back then, of course) and convinced my mom to get it for me. It caused so many troubles for the people at the cash register that they eventually gave up trying to figure out why the price and item didn't match each other and felt bad for taking up so much of our time with their screwups that they just GAVE it to me and let us walk out.
Being a little kid kicks so much ass because nobody ever suspects what a criminal little fuck you are.
The sad thing is that judging by the large number of people in US prisons, they don't seem to help. My guess is that many people see the prisons as holiday resorts - a place to get a warm shower, a real bed with a mattress and a blanket and 3 square meals a day.
Oh well, what the hell...
Barcodes are fairly easy to create using just a PC and a decent quality laser printer.
If they took it to the extreme that you needed to have a certain font card (a nice DIMM or SIMM) to produce any barcode, it would slow folks down a whole lot. When you have to spend a hundred or two to get the font card, the price for entry will slow down the casual twit.
15 day free trial on that program. That part just cracks me up.
- c'mon, you're actually endorsing this behavior? surely this isn't what you mean, right? btw, where are you employed? i'd like to forward this /. article to your boss's boss! happy holidays!
you're right that it may be natural to speculate and re-reason through the errors of others - but it is still a rather grotesque act - as the higher ground would be to primarily reason through how to prevent the heinous (the former reasoning perhaps existing only as a means to the latter).
In this case it is especially disturbing that someone chose for such a malicious statement to be publicly broadcast to such a large audience, especially since it is written in the first person (this is how "I" would execute my crime rather than, "perhaps this chap might have gotten away with it if he used the following clever suggestion"
It's akin to, "if I were robbing that bank, I would have shot every person in the head - that way no one would be able to rat me out" - this sort of statement is revealing as to a more crooked rather than curious line of thinking.
this might boil down to useless symantecs to you - but I believe there is much more too it
ôó
Nice police statement:
"Wahhhhh I want my mommmyyyyy"
Guess some people can't pay the time.
--> police spokeswoman Julie Brooks said. "We're seeing a lot more computer involvement in crimes that used to be almost juvenile in nature." --
They still are juvenile in nature, we're just dealing with smarter juveniles. the fact that a computer is involved does not magically make this crime more evil than if it had been done without a computer
Apparently not. The submitter's statement was -- to paraphrase in order to highlight the hypothetical even more blatently:
Had I been in this kid's shoes, I would have committed the same crime in a different way which would have resulted in a higher probability of not getting caught.
How do you know that was the hypothetical?
Maybe the hypothetical was if I were to commit the same crime, in which case not committing it wouldn't be an option.
Baldino was detained by Target security Wednesday after he purchased a $150 iPod with a bar-code label of $4.99.
Then later in the story, they say:
The specialist watched Baldino check out, discovering that Baldino paid for headphones worth $4.99, while he was walking out with an iPod worth $149.99.
So, where is an ipod for $149.99??? Not the Nano. Not the shuffle. There is no such animal. Is this the standard "Capitalize on the ipod name" story? I want answers! I want fact checkers!
I wonder how many people who are dissing this loser for stealing a meatspace item have downloaded copyrighted material illegally?
You could just scam a price gun and change the can of soup from 1.19 to .69 cents? I miss those days.
You're right about the clerk just not caring. And I'm sure you'll agree that it's Target's fault.
About eight years ago I was with a friend when she bought a $2,800 Macintosh from CompUSA for $1,400. Somehow, the computer running pricing had gotten misprogrammed, and as a result, all Macintosh models -- from the lowly entry-level desktop, to the top-of-the-line tower model -- were given the same sale price.
I was with my friend helping her pick out a computer. She was going to get the entry-level model, but on a whim asked how much the tower was selling for. When the clerk told us, I asked him to double check, because I knew that towers (at the time) started at $1,900. As we both bent down to check the SKU, I saw that this was the top-of-the-line model. He confirmed that it was selling for $1,300. I recommended to my friend that she purchase it.
If this were a mom and pop shop, I would have put a stop to the problem right then and there. But, you know what? I figured this is the cost of doing business the way these big shops do it. They hire kids, pay them peanuts, give them little or no training, and basically tell them, "Don't think! Just do what the computer tells you to do." If that's how you put together your sales force, then you'll have to eat these losses when they come along.
The sick thing is, the accountants at CompUSA probably had it all figured out -- staff compensation versus shrinkage -- and decided they'd make more money this way.
I'm not advocating stealing, but I shed no tears for these stores when their employees pay so little attention.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
and Infrared size scales (superfresh groceries) see nothing if you re-label the half gallon hellmans mayo as half gallon store mayo.
Seriously, no barcode software/scanner crap required.. buy one cheap bottle.. scan UPC and print/
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
What happened to "Personally, I would have not considered committing fraud in the first place"?
Society has seen a significant shift in attitude towards easy theft achieved via technological means. It would be nonsense to equate forging a barcode to steal a physical iPod with downloading an equivalent value in music/film/software. To some people however the widespread cultural acceptance of the one might make the other seem less heinous.
The guy wanted something, for whatever reason he wasn't willing to pay for it and there was some handy software that put it one click away. That's what happened to "Personally, I would have not considered committing fraud in the first place".
Personally I wouldn't try this at Target at all, mostly because I've seen how the Loss Prevention staff at Target work. My father worked for Target in Loss Prevention and as a company they take it very seriously. I got a chance to go into the security booth and see how it works at Target and... Wow. I went in and looked at all the monitors and said "That's a lot of cameras..." and the guy who was in there laughed and said, "no... This is a lot of cameras" -- and put the entire left-bank of monitors (the control room is rigged for two operators) on sequential scan.
Excepting the interiors of the dressing rooms and restrooms the whole store is pretty much perfectly covered. This was back in '94 when I was in there and my dad was showing me just how cool their shiz was. They had a system which would track a person through the store, switching the monitor from camera to camera to keep them covered. It wasn't perfect, you needed to get them so they were the only moving object in the frame and if they encountered a other people it would pop up the camera numbers for the areas they could go to from there around the borders of the screen. It was confusing to watch because as it shifted from camera to camera 'left' would become 'right' or 'up' but...
The cashiers are watched like -- every cashier has a camera on them, and every scan they make pops up the item number and price. When a card is swiped the card number pops up too. If the same card is used within a given period of time it automatically pops up onto the "suspicious activity" monitor.
The detail view on cashiers was really quite interesting - a series of bar graphs showed how high above/below the averages they were for credit vs cash , store credit vs external credit, dollar amount of sale, and several other indicators. My dad was telling me that because real shoplifting was relatively low cost compared to a clerk participating in a scam they put a lot more effort into finding the crooked clerks.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
How do you know that was the hypothetical? Maybe the hypothetical was if I were to commit the same crime, in which case not committing it wouldn't be an option.
I understand your line of thought, but the language of the submission sugguests otherwise.
Personally, I would have gone for a less blatant discount, or refrained from visiting the same store so soon afterwards.
"[As far as I'm concerned|If I were in his shoes|If it were me], then I would have gone..."
It's a simple conditional, something we around here should be familiar with. Hypotheticals and conditionals are, of course, related. He may have meant what you sugguest, I think that is a legitimate explaination of his intent, but if that is the case, he should have used appropriately precise syntax.
That's all beside the point though.
Sony ha
I don't condone fraud by any means, but it's hardly surprising scams like this work (sorta). When you pay people peanuts and demand that they shut their brains off and be good little living robots, they're not likely to notice or care what comes up when they scan an item. In fact, a fair portion of them probably give a silent little cheer if they see the store get ripped off.
To catch thieves, you must think like a thief.
And yes, the abyss is always there, staring right back atcha. You want a life without temptation, go find a Zen monastery.
I'm surprised nobody has attempted to rip off the automatic pop-bottle deposit machines (obviously you would have to live in a state that has pop bottle desposits/refunds to understand). The machines generate a reciept with the dollar/cent amount embedded right into the barcode. It would only take getting a thermal reciept printer, and printing up some reciepts random dollar amounts, and redeeming them for instant cash.
Why not just steal the goddamn thing?
I'm sure with all this scheming, they could have easily found a simple way to swipe the iPod and get it out of the store.
In other words, the label shouldn't convey the information "Charge this customer $X.XX", it should convey "Check for item XYZ... Return price."
Personally, I wouldn't have been in Boulder in the first place.
A counterfactual is a special type of conditional that asserts something counter to the facts (a hypothetical to anyone outside of contemporary analytic philosophy). They typically cause no end of confusion due to their natural ambiguities.
For more on these logical puzzles, I recommend W.V.O. Quine and David Lewis.
The poster's counterfactual is ambiguous, in much the same way that allows both of the following statements to be coherently, simultaneously true:
1) If Caesar had invaded Iraq, he would use the Atomic Bomb.
2) If Caesar had invaded Iraq, he would use catapults.
Either of your interpretations is fair, on the face of the language. However, drawing an inference that the submitter was trying to say, "I endorse crime," seems somewhat less than charitable.
that's what they do..
but if it is the WRONG label(sticker), it returns the WRONG price
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Some stores have a pretty strict "honor the sticker price" policy. I'm not sure why, false advertising lawsuits maybe, but at any rate. Happened to my father at Sears once. He was buying a tool, a fairly expensive one, and it rang up for half the listed price. He told the clerk that was a mistake, but the clerk said didn't matter, you got the lowest price.
I don't know about Target, but maybe it's similar. They may tell cashiers to simply give items to a person for the price that's rung up to avoid problems.
Target and many other retailers really do have very nice security systems in place. But to what extent very few people outside of law enforcement and their loss prevention staff realize. I assist a Sheriff's Department with their computer and other technical needs as part of my job. When they need a hand I am more than happy to lend one. On one such case we were sent a CD with video on it showing a suspect attempting to purchase large amounts of Sudafed. Yes you guessed it to make everyones favorite trailor park candy...Meth. Not only that but they were making the purchase with a stolen check book. What we were sent from Target along with the video was an overhead high resolution picture that gets snapped at the time of purchase (yes smile everyone it happens every time you buy something there). This picture is digitaly stored along with an exact duplicate of the transaction recipt. It's pretty much a slam dunk when you walk into court with those. There is your nice smiling face, everything that was purchased along with complete payment information. At the end of the day if they do in fact conduct some form of audit how hard do you actually think it is to run a search for every transaction that included a specific item and what was paid for it? This time of year it is just very hard to do an on the floor count of items when people are all over the store with them in carts and often "orphan" items on other shelves. Sooner or later they will get caught.
Come on people, they dont go up to cashiers and try to buy an ipod for $5, they use the self checkout lanes that many stores have. You check yourself out and it makes sure your not stealing by checking the weight when you drop it in the bag, so you can put a label saying your like 10oz. ipod is really a 10oz. box of poptarts (im bad with weight...). So then you just scan it, drop it in the bag, pay your $5, and walk out. The only way you would get caught is if the guy sitting at the watching station saw you only put in a $5 for a $300 object.
Back in the late 70s, or early 80s the Skaggs-Albertson's in Waco carried fishing gear. Being a bass fishing type of guy, I frequented the 'Fishing Department" often. One afternoon I discovered that the store had got several Fenwick rods in. A couple of the spinning rods were models that I had been fantasying about for a year or so.
I was shocked when I saw the prices. They were about 1/4 of SRP. You did not get Fenwick rods back then for less than SRP. There were also 4 Plano tackle boxes that I had been admiring in the BassPro catalogue for a couple of years. They too were 1/4 of SRP. A couple of my buddies were with me, and the three of us scrapped to gather enough case on the spot to purchase these items.
I never have found out what the deal was, whether these items were mismarked, or if there was some skullduggery afoot. In any case I've still got both rods though I don't use them so much anymore. I gave the tackle boxes to one of my nephews, and he's still using them.
Frank, one of the above mention friends has always believed that we blinded-sided some tag switcher. His dad was a lawyer and there were some group of people about that time where one person would go into stores and switch tags one day and another would come back a couple of days later and purchase the items. Almost all of the suspected switches were to items that the average store employe would not know about, so the prices that the items were switched to did not draw suspicion. No one was ever arrested, and I don't believe that there was really anyone that was strongly suspected. The only clue that this might have been going on was the some of the store managers were finding items that were 'mismarked' with unusually high frequency. The suspicion was that if the second person got even a little nervous that things were not going well they'd never make the purchase.
I'm, personally, not so sure that this was the case. About 7 months after I purchased the rods and tackle boxes, fishing gear other than hooks, weights, line, and lures disappeared from the store. I'm thinking that the rods and tackle boxes were discounted to get them out of the store. Who knows???
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
Gee, I'm surprised you didn't go the extra length to compare his hypothetical statement to the holocaust--that would have been a much better hyperbole IMHO.
But you're right, stealing an iPod from Target store is truly a heinous crime. I can see it now--all those Target stockholders having to explain to their kids why they won't be celebrating Christmas this year because someone stole an iPod from one of the stores! And to think, people still concern themselves with petty issues like labor exploitation and poverty. It's truly sickening.
Why didn't the cashier notice this before?
Comparing stories, it looks like the penalties vary widely. I'm guessing the Denver story only made the news on Slashdot because it involved an iPod.
once more terribly sorry," Baldino wrote in a statement
for police. "Please let me go for I am terribly sorry!!! I'm
only a kid! Help me out. I just want to go home. I did this
not knowing of the serious penalty that lies behind it.
Please! Please! Please!"
Exactly how much voltage were they applying to his testicles when he wrote that statement?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I don't know if this applies everywhere, but where I cashiered, the price was actually encoded in the barcode, along with the UPC, because often we'd have merchandise on the floor whose price had actually gone up, and we had forgotten (read: were too lazy) to retag it. Since it's easier to lose a buck or two than to tell someone they have to pay more than marked for an item, and risk losing them altogether, the computer would always compare the price encoded on the tag to the one on file, and then give the customer the lower of the two. Thus, you don't even need to try to pass it off as a different item - all you do is pick your price, stick on the new label and go! Of course I should hope the computer would also log if something regurlary hundreds of dollars slipped by for $4.99, but you could still get some pretty decent *ahem* discounts this way.
RFID for retail stores is probably still the unauthenticated RFID. It's unauthenticated in the sense that the tag spits out the same response all the time, so if you have an RFID reader/writer ($300US) you can read it and maybe even write a new one to it.
The authenticated ones take in data and then spit out a result, which is quite a bit more expensive. I doubt reading/writing is so easy to these.
...but I'd be happy if the price in the computers at stores matched the price displayed. I have almost been overcharged twice (that I noticed) once each at Menard's and Home Despot. I may very well not have noticed the overcharge at Home Depot if I were buying >1 of the item.
How about laws to protect consumers from this? I was able to get the correct price both times, but only because I was alert enough to notice. How many times have I (or you) not been alert enough?
"It's the spirit of Capitalism. God bless this country."
No it's the spirit of greed and selfishness. The economic system doesn't make a lick of difference.
What kind of starving Hero of the Soviet People feeds his kids a stolen iPod?
One with an eBay account, used to convert the iPod into cash.
In this instance, she only switched the price tag, not made her own barcode.
I got confused, because it's been a long time since I've seen anything with a price tag. I only see barcode tags any more, so I equated them in my mind.
In Soviet Russia, you know how to invert the MATRIX, diagnoalize the MATRIX, QR factorize it, find its eigenvalues, do singular value decomposition on it, etc, etc...
In Capitalist America, you know the MATRIX is a movie with Keanu Reeves...
It can't be done. Bar codes use a checksum.
You'd have to precisely alter both the UPC/EAN code value's bars *AND* the check digit bar in order to make them match.
Also, the UPC/EAN numeric code is printed in plaintext below the bars, so if the laser refuses to scan them (as it will if the check digit bar doesn't add up) then the cashier can enter it manually (and probably see the incorrect item name/price..)
Unless you have magical caliper-eyeballs or something, I'd say you heard an urban legend..
Check it out: http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/upc.htm
w00t! -AC
At the risk of ruining my karma, can anyone explain what this story has to do with my (or your) Rights Online?
:)
As far as I'm aware stealing things from Target doesn't count as either online or a right
"Don't break my arse, my bargey wargey arse, I don't think my pants would understand..."
Well it's going to be people like them that will push the shift to RFID tags in everything. Just the same way people who run red lights will ensure we have more cameras in intersections and on the streets.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Forget the checker - with the prevalence of the self-checkout line I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often.
At least in Texas, code switching is tantamont to forgery, which is worse than stealing.
so if I were in this kids shoes, wanting so badly for a device that I'd do something dishonest on-site to get it, I'd just shove the thing in my (pants, back-pack, mafia-issued trenchcoat....)
Actually, I don't know how big the boxes are for these, so I don't really know about conceiling it. but I'd rather do that than go up for forging price tags.
He probably didn't think that stealing less than $300 worth of merchandise was going to merit serious jail time, either. Personally, I think Target needs to chill the heck out, the kid's probably been scared straight already. No need for any prison rape, slashdotters!
He is expendable. The company is paying him pathetic wage for working long shifts doing the same brainless motion, forced to smile while taking shit from rude customers. These companies stress their lowlevel workers to almost inhuman limits, as there is always another desperate kid looking for work.
So what if he catches the thief? Target gives him a nod, and sends him back to his cash register.
...for $1.99 this way?
Jesus, an iPod for $4.99! Somebody's an idiot - and I'd say both the kid and whoever actually rang up a sale for this price qualify.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
"I wonder how many people who are dissing this loser for stealing a meatspace item have downloaded copyrighted material illegally?"
How many of them belong to a religious group? Remember Atheists are honest.
Back to kindergarden for you!
:)
Kindergarten is the right word!! You should go back too
Had I been in this kid's shoes, and I had already decided to commit this crime, here's how I would go about doing it
I'm not sure why that's not exceedingly obvious.
Several years ago, as we were getting ready to go on vacation to Europe, we purchased a set of inexpensive suitcases to use for the trip. List price was $49.99, and it was marked as such on the tag. I would note that we did not screw with the tag in any way; we expected to pay $50 + tax for the set of two bags.
We checked out with those and several other items, and our total bill was under $30. As we walked out, we realised they'd made a mistake, and went back. The cashier looked at the tag, saw the $49.99 price on it, rescanned it, and it rang up at 4.99. She said "Well, looks like you got a good deal" and sent us on our way. We shoud've gone and purchased the other set as well, because now the first set (which has probably over 150,000 miles on it) has disintegrated, and we need to purchase another set.
The point here is that low-price retail stores need to treat their employees well enough that they care when someone points out a mistake like this. The girl at the checkout couldn't be bothered to correct the mistake, even though we were surprisingly honest about the store's mistake and offered them the chance to correct it. That's what you get when you hire minimum-wage workers who get no benefits - they couldn't care less whether the company loses money because of something like this.
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
Barcode changing is just sick and wrong. Though it might be fun to try in private just for kicks.
Exactly how much voltage were they applying to his testicles when he wrote that statement?
I would have guessed 150 volts, but the meter said only 5V...
"No wonder crime is such a problem. You need to grow up and realize that breaking the rules/law is wrong whether or not you get caught."
I agree. Now excuse me I have a "illegal copyright infringement" P2P download I have to finish up.
In today's Dilbert cartoon we see a career criminal looking for a job.
e. For Class 5 felonies, the jury or court may choose imprisonment for one to 10 years or jail for up to 12 months and a fine of up to $2,500, either or both.
Re-read that. Where do you get the "AND/OR"?
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
Since a consumer has no business creating their own barcodes, we should ban all sales of barcode printers, make it a crime to possess such a machine, and make it illegal to use and create software that can generate barcodes. Furthermore, we should pass laws to make it so only one company is legally allowed to create a barcode format and all the hardware and software associated with it. Any other company who wishes to enter the barcode market should not be able to do so.
...
Since a consumer has no business utilizing peer-to-peer filesharing technologies, we should ban
(Moral of the story: P2P is not a crime [in itself as a technology]!)
http://pixelcort.com/
Wish I had mod points. you'd be on your way to "-5 Holier-than-thou"
You're presuming to know the editor's intent, and furtermore using it as a platform to go wildly off topic.
Seriously, your first attempt to introduce moral judgement to this discussion was off-topic. Continuing to run your mouth and argue your point simply marks you as a self-important fuckwit.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
The only exception to this is frozen foods, deli and other packaged items in grocery stores, where the last 5 (?) digits display the price!
-Palal
'Loosing' is the present participle of the word 'to loose', as in 'to untie, unfetter, free': 'Cry "havoc", and let loose the dogs of war!' is a common misquote of Shakespeare.
'Loosening' is the present participle of the word 'to loosen', as in 'to make less tight'.
If you're going to correct someone, at least get it right.
Your average Wal-Mart employee doesn't know the price of their stuff. You're supposed to get the price that's listed on the shelf, but unless you complain about it, the cashier wont do anything. I went to buy a t-ball bat and the shelf price was around $9, I get to the checkout and its $30. That's about as bad as an ipod for $5.
Maybe this fraud on the part of the customer will encourage the retail stores to keep track of their prices. Hopefully they wont have to be taken too many times to figure it out.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
An order of magnitude, in situations like this, is best defined using scientific notation.
A number, let's say the cost of an iPod, is represented as a value and an order of magnitude:
149.99 = 1.4999 x 10^2
A number exactly one order of magnitude above that one would be represented much the same, but with an exponent one higher:
1499.90 = 1.4999 x 10^3
I got 1337 cr4x and pr1nt3d my 0wnz b4rc0d35 w17h my m0mz l453r
Personally, I would have gone for a less blatant discount, or refrained from visiting the same store so soon afterwards.
I agree. If you're going to try to swap the barcode, 1.) Don't make the price so outrageuosly noticable, 2.) Use the bar code for a similarly branded device, E.G. swap a Video iPod tag for that of an iPod Shuffle, and 3.) Be prepared to pay full price if they aren't fooled.
And when it runs Linux, you get to play oggs and .au's and mp3s!
for an order of magnitude can be found here.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
That said nearly everyone evaluates pretty much everything in terms of "I would have done this better" or "If it was me I'd have done that..." -- at least I do...And on the occasions when we've talked about it, every one of my friends seems to do so as well.
intersting
Might as well just shoot the cashier. "Go for the gold"
I hate grammar Nazi's.
Perhaps if the people in power were punished when they were caught, we'd all feel bad. But, um, they aren't even punished when they are caught. And they don't feel bad.
So, start locking up the CEOs. Lock up every single white collar criminal who's stolen money from their investors or the government. Let them serve ten minutes for every dollar they've stolen, and apply the rule to petty thieves.
A kid steals an iPod, he gets 50 hours in the tin. Ken "Kenny Boy" Lay gets life. Seems fair to me.
This reminds me of another trick a friend (who will remain anonymous) of mine once tried to pull. He heard some guys on irc talking about how they would buy new expensive video cards from circuit city, install them, put the old card back in the box and return it for a full refund the next day. Apparently the store clerks just look to see if there is a card in the box, and make you sign something.
So my buddy tried this with a new sound card. He paid cash and decided to forge his name when he returned it. Unfortunately the dumbass forgot do clean his old card off before putting it in the box to return it. So he took the card back and the clerk looked at if for a minute, then called their electronics 'expert' over. He looked at it and said something along the lines of, "it's dusty, I don't know if we can take it in this condition." So my friend panicked and said ok and promptly exited the premises without making the return.
I suppose this isn't quite the same as switching barcodes, but I wonder what the punishment would be if you were caught. Anybody else gotten away with this?
You do meta-moderate, don't you?
Or sew one of those theft deterrent stickers inside someone's jacket so they set off the alarm when they walk through the door.
Seems to me that printing your own barcodes for goods is just a form of bartering. If the store is willing to accept your revised price offer, the sale is done.
Aiding and abetting
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Had I been in this kid's shoes, - I would not have been able to walk at all. Hypothetically speaking
You can't handle the truth.
Shooting everyone in the head seriously raises your risks, because, if you get caught, you're going down for murder. And it means you can't take hostages.
The least risky way to rob a bank, in fact, is the way that breaks the fewest laws. Ideally, you could use some sort of money-teleporter to just take the money, and not even be charged with breaking-and-entering.
Actaully, the least risky way to rob a bank is to not, in fact, commit a crime, then they can't get you on anything. The risks are zero. However, at that point, the rewards have also gone down to infintesimal. You're basically reduced to standing around and waiting for the bank to explode by random chance, showering you in money, and that is pretty damn unlikely.(1)
And, by using the second person in that example, I have just proven you to have a criminal mind. HA! ;)
However, as was pointed out, figuring out how to commit a crime is the only way to ever stop crime. You can catch criminals without thinking like them, but you cannot stop them from commiting a crime in the first place if you cannot think of the crime.
And the only way to figure out how to do it is to say 'How would I do this?'. It's a psychological fact. You are the only person whose decisions you see, so when you're imagining a random someone deciding what to do, you put yourself in that place.
Yes, even writers, when thinking 'What would character X do?', are really thinking 'If I was character X and thought like him, what would I do?'. You can imagine other people acting, because you see that all the time, but you cannot imagine other people making decisions without taking their decision making process and figuring out what you would do if you thought like that, because you have no access to the inside of other peoples' heads.(2)
This is expecially true when figuring out crimes, because you aren't intentionally trying to limit your decision making process to someone else's. You don't go 'Let's pretend I'm a poor housewife named 'Sandy' with a husand whose income is $20,000, and two kids, how would I commit this crime?', that's just silly.
Whether or not it's phrased as 'me' doing those things, or some random person, or even some specific person like you, it's really how 'I' came up with a way of doing them.
So what person you state the result in is irrelevant. Either you can't understand why anyone does actions you disapprove of (Which makes you eligable for sainthood, and makes you the most naive person in the world.), or you understood their actions by reverse engineering them through your decision-making process.
1) But, hey, I check every time I drive past a bank, just in case.
2) Poor writers make everyone either think like themselves, or they make everyone just act, with no thinking behind it, or some combination of this.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seuss
I think he wanted a blowjob
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
> What's wrong with people?
SIN
A nice bit scheme would be to go into Target, and retag all of the iPods to be $4.99.... Then an accomplice buys one of them, and can credibly plead innocence. A whole bunch of other people buy them for $4.99 too. If you skip the accomplice, you get nice corporate sabotage...
Continuing to run your mouth and argue your point simply marks you as a self-important fuckwit.
And yet, not only has the +5 rating of his first post survived at least one negative rating so far, his bizarre rationalization for ignoring the obvious meaning of an extremely common turn of phrase is at +4 and climbing.
Perhaps his posts tweak some sort of nerdly need for precision in language (not that his use of language is particularly precise either) that resonates with slashdotters.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I would like to point out that it is the previous generation(s) who hold positions of influence in business and government routinely get away with henious crimes. (Take small sentences for destroying retirement funds for thousands of people, among other things.) We frequently see the wealthy and powerful get away with minor punishments that are effectively summed up as serving a prison sentence on a yaht in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, our society is replete with cases of minor offenses being punished beyond any reasonable severity. ($250,000 and larger fines for music swappers, or felony charges for young children reading passwords printed on their computers, for example.) If I was a young person, I would be extremely confused. Does this mean that the more serious your crimes are, the less serious the consequences? Does this mean I can do whatever I want if I am affluent? Given that getting into some trouble is part of youth, this makes for a dangerous influence. There are also plenty of cases where breaking the law is not “wrong”, so we cannot treat this as an absolute either. What Rosa Parks did was not wrong or unethical (quite the opposite), but it was most certainly against the rules.
So, you are absolutely correct that stealing is wrong, as is breaking most laws. However, I think we as a society need to do a few things (which come to mind) if we are to have any success in reducing crime. First, the punishments must fit the crime. Copying digital music should not have equal or worse consequences to stealing millions, perhaps billions from a corporation. Murder is a felony charge, not typing a password printed on the bottom of your laptop. You get the idea. Second, we must teach people how to properly evaluate laws and whether or not they are just. This is intrinsic to the continued operation of our democracy but it is hardly given any treatment. People must be able to determine which laws are reasonable insofar as the gravity of violations, and which laws must be disobeyed for the greater good. Third, we need to restore equal application under law irregardless of political, social, or economic standing. Today, the wealthy can afford good lawyers who are better versed in the law and thus finding loopholes. Meanwhile, the poor rarely have competent defense. This is very biased, and aside from being unfair and unjust, it also leads to further crime (these cycles are much more likely to be perpetuated in the lower classes).
Join Tor today!
It is a cultural mainstay of ours to steal from the rich and give to the poor because the rich are likely greedy and corrupt. Why is Robin Hood a hero, but someone who steals from a corporation that pays starvation wages, drives smaller businses out, and fills out world with junk a criminal?
Join Tor today!
Not all of us feel that we need to seperate ourselves from any temptation to keep from doing bad things. Some of us, you see, have a conscience and self-control to help us get thru the day without accidentally committing mass homicide.
Is succeeding at theft really doing something better? For who? The thief? If that truly defines "better", than we should probably give more credit to the Marxist criticism of Adam Smith's philosophy of self-interests.
As for the "if it was me I'd have done that..." It seems that phraseology was the basis of the parent poster's criticism. If "..." = "something evil" well, then it is indicative of you being a jerk.
Of course, he tries to do it again, but the article doesn't say if it's the same Target. If it is, what a moron. Go to a different store (if you're so ethically declined).
Hindsight is 20/20. There is no such thing as being 40% arrested, so if one gets away scot free the first time, then one tends to assume that it wasn't noticed at all and that there is no chance of getting caught.
This is why serial killers and the like always get caught in the end. As long as they elude the police, the natural assumption is that the police aren't on the trail at all. Ergo, it's okay to get sloppier and take more risks. Ergo, one gets caught.
Perfection without apparent reward for perfection is inhuman. We require feedback, and neophyte criminals don't really get any (before comparing notes in prison, of course).
My other body is also not wearing any.
Anyone who really wanted to do this right would relabel many items in the store then send an coconspirator into the store to make the purchase.
In this way one person relabels and another person buys. The security tapes won't show a thing and with many items re-priced store security is going to be way too busy dealing with all the innocent people who happened to pick up one of the relabeled items to figure out who's in on the scam and who isn't.
25 years ago, I worked in a department store. In addition to the price tag on >$25 items (we actually had PRICES on items then, and there wasn't any air either), there was an additional innocuous-looking stamped coded dollar price on the box in ink, put there by the pricing persons. If they didn't match fairly closely, the checkout person was to call the department manager. Simple, and fairly foolproof (caught quite a few pricetag switchers).
This still seems to be a good idea, although obviously you would have to bump the price to maybe $100 because of the extra labor involved.
Apparently, common sense has deteriorated more quickly than can be compensated for with technology!
If he'd just stuffed it down his pants and walked out he'd just have a misdemeanor theft.
Shoplifting though it petty theft as all you can get away with is what you can smuggle on your person.
Someone printing out fake bar codes takes the game to a whole new level, being able to get even some of the largest objects in the store at a huge discount! I think it's good to send a message that you will get in a hell of a lot more trouble if you really game the system vs. grabbing something here and there and dropping it in your pocket.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The submitter was obviously trying to get the kid to do this again, so he could post the dupe!
It's comments like yours that make me really glad Slashdot still supports AC posting as that was worthwhile to read and definitely a good subject to post AC on.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You may have noticed in the same article how the guy is now a felon?
I don't think any "Ten easy steps to becoming a felon" guide is going to get a lot of traction.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
An interesting story, I've seen a few things like this at Best Buy where something meant as a freebe is marked at .01. Mostly special bonus DVD's, the last one I remember was some Seinfeld extra DVD. I rember entering the store with three pennies I had found on the ground, and leaving with three different DVD's I had legally purchased for .03...
None of them were any good of course but your story brought it to mind and helped explain the wierd pricing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I work at a grocery store, and I'm surprised I don't hear about this kind of thing more often. Stores seem to think that somehow barcodes equal security, that it's a good idea to use barcodes for things like keys and system commands. The self-checkouts at the store where I work use a barcode card on a lanyard to access the cashier functions. I could easily create one of these cards at any security level, for any store in the chain, with nothing but the unique store number printed clearly on the face of every card. Then there are the customer savings cards, also barcoded, which you need to pay by check. They print the card number right on the reciept, and all you would need to do is dig it out of the trash, spend ten seconds calculating the missing checksum digit, and you could write a bad check on someone else's account and ding their credit report.
use the self checkout lanes. Easier to get distracted when you watch 4 people instead of 1.
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
Just use a freaking UPC code. Don't cook up some kooky barcode scheme that includes the price. Use the manufacturer's UPC. Then you don't have to put all those stickers on and the clerk will notice if they scan an ipod and it rings up as a $4.99 box of tampons.
Why do ethics depend on any deity? I can give you a half dozen atheistic systems of ethics, Secular Humanism and Objectivism being the most prevalent.
A basic common ethical system makes society work. I'm not talking Christian or otherwise, I'm talking about the basics. (No premeditated killing, no stealing, the simple stuff) Without that reasonable expectation of society, we see the dissolution such as in Afghanistan, where the rule of law is might makes right.
You've heard of the social contract, right?
So how did he print the barcodes to scam the printer? And if he already have a means of printing bar codes, why did he want the printer? My head hurts.
Where are you going to get these RFIDs that your going to inject into items you wish to steal?
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
I had the same idea back around 1989 when I was about 15. Luckily for my criminal record, I never did get my program to print EAN-13 barcodes working completely right...
At least here in Finland you can't just change the price of a product by changing the barcode. The cash register uses the original EAN/UPC barcodes of the product to identify it and checks its database for the current price. A new barcode would show up as an unidentified product.
And switching barcodes is rather difficult, as the barcode is part of the product packaging. A sticker would look quite suspicious (although they do exist). And since the cash register always shows the product name, a switched code would display the name of the original product.
The returned recycle bottle receipt might be one exception. I think it encodes the sum of the returned bottles, and the cash register could accept custom versions. (It also might just use unique codes generated by the recycled bottle collector machine.)
Personally, I welcome our hypothetical overlords!
[clever sig]
As 62.5% of all statistics are fictional, that only leaves 37.5% that can be bullshit.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Surely this is fairly trivial for the company to overcome. Just use the barcode to denote the item rather than the price (I thought it did that anyway) and look up the correct price in a table. People could attach the barcode of something (lets say a frying pan) to an iPod in an attempt to get a lower price but the person at the checkout should be able to tell the difference. If it's that hard show the person on the till a picture of what it's expected to be. It increases the cognative load of the person on the till a little but not by an unacceptable amount I would have thought.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
anarchocapitalist in every post? I've noticed that in the last couple of comments you've posted, you keep on saying it. Who are you trying to win over? No one gives a shit what your political/economic leanings are. Grow up. You sound like a guy who just discovered the word.
Just goes to show people don't become criminals because they're smart.
Why not? If anyone is going to consider becoming a criminal, it should be the smart ones. What you meant to say was that criminals don't get CAUGHT because they're smart. There are smart criminals. If they're really smart, they're the only ones who ever realize a crime was committed.
For example:
A dumb criminal switches barcodes to get a cheaper IPod. A SMART criminal hacks into the inventory control system, altering the number of products that were in inventory so that there's one less iPod and one more of the other item.
paintball
http://www.taxhavenco.com/osm/BankCharter.html
Make your own bank for $50K USD.
Get depositors at 6% return, lend out money at 9:1 fractional credit creation, and Profit
Take billions in drug lords deposits and people seeking tax shelters.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I doubt that GWB and friends care, with their illegal detainments, and money laundering and
secret CIA MEDIA employees and CIA prisons and 15%+ credit creation M1/M2/M3 money supplies and the new
FED chairman hidding M3 money supply. And the central banks stealing everyones money via inflation/devalation of the US$.
Get real dude, the powers that be - they are the real crooks, stealing $500 is nothing compared to $700 BILLION YEARLY.
Not all laws are just or sane or for the people - but for corporations , thats why lawyers are politicians and they make the law.
www.prisonplanet.com
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Your post is FUD.
First, the percentage of inventory lost to shoplifting is NOT A RELEVANT STATISTIC. Losses are determined by the VALUE of inventory lost to shoplifting. If you lose 0.6% of your department store's inventory, but it's all diamond rings, that's a big problem. You'll tend to lose a lot more valuable inventory than unvaluable inventory.
Second, 1% is a lot, especially if your profit margins are 2-5%. While a 1% difference in price may not be a big deal to you, it's a huge difference to the store.
Third, what's wrong with getting rid of employees? Economic growth DEPENDS on getting rid of employees. The less people involved in getting a product to a consumer, the more people we can employ on providing other products. If the company gets rid of an employee, saving the costs of paying that employee, competition will force those savings to get passed onto the consumer. That consumer will then spend that money they saved elsewhere - causing more people to be employed over there (or they'll save it, and it'll get invested somewhere else, causing more people to be employed over there.) The net result: More stuff!
There's a reason we all tend to have TV's, PC's, and cars, instead of being poor farmers or 60-80-hour week factory workers like we were in the 1800's: JOB ELIMINATION! Any job that can be eliminated by technology should be. If we're really good at it, technology will eliminate all jobs and we can spend all our time watching TV and still have all the stuff we want.
paintball
Every day, the govt takes 35% of my money without asking, they just DO IT. If I dont agree, its 49%.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
So... What if you don't actually steal anything. Just go in with a bunch of barcodes and stick them on stuff... Randomly...
Deleted
twenty+ years ago i was a roofing apprentice (as in hot tar) with limited funds and a wife and three kids to support. work gloves are essential in this trade for obvious reasons. i bleve it was a local Menard store that bundled several pairs of gloves with a paper wrapper, and sold the bundles for a cheaper per unit price. there was a lengthy stretch of time when i would buy the bundled gloves and the cashier would scan the UPC on an individual pair of gloves.
karmatically last year, i left my tacoma in the local Menard's parking lot for about an hour to do some shopping and browsing. at some point while inside the store my truck's rear bumper was removed and carted off. no witnesses. no lot cameras.
Serenity now, insanity later.
The Smoking gun document is the best...
This actually happened to me when I worked at a Wal-Mart during college.
Gent would come in purchase winches priced at $399.99 for $109.99 winch price then with reciept tape he bought on the black market would return with reciept the $399.99 winch for $280 profit.
He went to 7 various wal-marts in the area in a big loop over and over. He was finally caught in the parking lot printing labels from his laptop.
This was in 1996
In my defense I will say that mentioning Barcode Magic implied (in my mind) that the thief was doing something a bit more sophisticated than essentially Xeroxing barcodes from other products.
BarCode Magic could be used to bilk millions of songs for just pennies. This is potentially more devastating that peer to peer networks.
...a more appropriate analogy would be you going to the car dealership, replacing the sticker with your own forged sticker price, and demand to buy it at that price. You're not making a counter offer, you are fraudulently claiming the dealership gave you an offer. That is something completely different than trying to haggle.
That said I think fraud, not theft sounds like the proper charge. Even though the result may be the same, the method and thus the crime is different. Sort of like copyright violation and theft, both may get you an illegal copy of Britney's latest CD, but the method and thus the crime is different. And seeing how fraud is the more serious of the charges, I think the theft is just to "throw the book" and see what sticks...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm not sure why that's not exceedingly obvious.
Maybe because doing something very unintelligent in a very intelligent way is something of an oxymoron?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
People who dislike Wal-Mart going in and re-barcoding products they then leave on the shelf. With the idea of letting OTHER consumers to have a positive Wal-Mart Experience.
If he does felony time, he won't be a voter anymore. Convicted felons are disenfranchised.
In any event, considering the general low level of participation in elections in the United States, I think it's pretty safe to assume that the kid wouldn't have voted anyway. Odds are far better that he would have voted on American Idol.
I looked at the article you cited about children only looking at passwords printed on their computer and being charged with felonies. As usual for Slashdot, what YOU said it means and what the article said it means are 2 different things. The article stated that the password was known to the student body and said nothing about it being "printed" on their computers. You also failed to mention that this password was used to disable administrative monitoring of the PCs and that the PCs were used to download porn and (gasp!) music files. I'm not here to argue about the severity of the charges, but to point out that the kids did more than just read a password.
You say we are reducing crime with harsher sentences, but we have the highest number of prisoners per capita in the world. What should we make of the fact that we have 80% more people in jail than the global average (and leading Canada by 84%)? Are just better at catching people? Then there is the fact that yearly prisoner intake is increasing steadily. Of course, that said, I am not sure how to interpret that the incarceration rate has slowed. I would also like to point out that just because violent crime is going down (as your data demonstrate), it does not indicate that crime as a whole is decreasing. Case in point: we have more and more white collar crime that (largely) goes unpunnished. Your assumption, by the way, that harsher sentencing is a direct contributor is likely erroneous. Take Finland’s admirably low crime rates and note their justice system utilizes lighter sentences which focus on rehabilitation (I will cite a source after I get to work ;).
Join Tor today!
Unless the security staff saw him applying his bar code sticker to the package, I'm sort of surprised that he was caught on the second time. Store clerks often seem oblivious to the value of what they're scanning.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
You can read his statement at thesmokinggun.com
His lack of knowledge of the law is his undoing. He made culpatory voluntary statements to the security guard and the police. Basically open and shut case.
What he should have done is stickered multiple items and only "bought" one. He should have denied any knowledge of anything to do with anthying. Barcode? whats a barcode?
You have me on video doing this before? I'm shocked at the invasion of my privacy! Seize my laptop? wiggle wiggle, ok. (Read: laptop is prepared beforehand to provide exculpatory evidence and further the invasion claims...) News should read: TARGET jails poor student, seizes laptop, STUDENT awarded 25,000 in damges.
Oh well, now he knows better.
1. Credit card smart readers that you just wave the card past
2. Your own credit card printer and embedding tech
3. Your own custom RFID tags
4. No human over site to actually see what you have "bought"
5. ?????
6. Profit!
It's closer then you think...
I agree with the grandparent. Using [sic] when quoting someone comes across as pretty arrogant, even if that was not your intention. I also found it extra funny that immediately after that, you made a bad spelling error yourself. :) I dont think less of you, just my 2 cents. And I'm not saying I'm a perfect speller, but, I won't go out of my way to point out others mistakes.
Joseph?
Moreover, one could really consider them two different kinds of choices: one ethical, and one intellectual. (granted, calculated risk is a part of the ethical decision)
Ya know, if you were trying to escape with an unpaid for (see: stolen) stereo in your car, I think that you'd be expecting to be caught. It wouldn't exactly be random.
Not that I think it's a smart thing to try on part of the manager, as it's a good way to get either ones ass kicked or sued off.
Kroger has an even better policy - it rings up wrong, it's free. We were given formula for free because it rang up $5.00 over the sale price. Wonder whose bottom line that comes out of.
SYS 64738
The problem with the ATM giving cash is, if you don't take it then what do you do with it? If you give it back to the bank, well they get the cash but there's a decent enough chance that it may have screwed up and come out of somebody else's account. There comes a certain point at which you can't prove ownership of a particular item, be it something valuable or hard, cold, cash. At that point you can either choose to pass ownership to somebody else who is not any more entitled to it than you, or take possession yourself.
Now I'm not talking about a lost wallet or credit card with appropriate ID, but sometimes chance passes something your way. There's a big difference between deliberately scamming somebody and accepting when fate throws something your way.
And for the record (and because I'll probably be flamed) I will point out that the last time I found a nice gold credit card stuck in a bank machine I took time to track it down... found the owner in the phonebook and returned it to him. Had it been cash which was not in any way tracable back to an original owner, yes I would have taken it... though likely after waiting around awhile to see if somebody came around looking for it (sometimes people will forget to snag some/all of their cash from the machine).
For the not-so cunning linguists:
1. Hire a few store pickpockets
2. Deploy in various areas of the store
3. ???
4. Profit!
Let's all print barcodes and stick them on random products at Wal-Mart and leave them on the shelves. Use multiple barcodes and prices so they can't just be on the lookout for one item or price in the system. For example, random DVDs and CDs could ring up at $.29. New releases for $.88. Get enough people to do this in enough places, and they'll never know for sure who is actually attempting theft and who is an innocent victim of a prank. Want to go all Robin Hood with it? Price diapers, baby formula, and various foodstuffs anywhere from $.25 to $1.50.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Of course anyone in his position is biased, but he doesn't present his case for why he thinks quite well, nor have I seen a tutorial on how to best utilize the moderation system.
So when will the RFID companies start putting up anarchist websites to encourage this; thus moving companies to RFID?
:)
Anyway, I don't have much sympathy for thieves, but I'd have a lot of sympathy for a hypothetical "true anarchist" who placed discount stickers on lots of items, but didn't buy any themsevles. One would presumably mark the most expensive iPod down to the least expensive iPod. Physical evidice would be minimized if he threw away the sticker backing material before leaving the store too, used a printer which could not trace to him, and wore gloves. Not too hard to minimized CCTV evidence either. Now if he dressed in a santa hat, that would just be priceless.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
" "He looked for female checkers that he thought did not know enough about electronic items to catch the switch," Schuler wrote in his report. "
I take offense at that!
I know more about this stuff than any guy I know. And in general, people who work at Target aren't the brightest light bulbs in the bunch.
The article said that price swapping had been around before, not barcode swapping.
Price swapping is what happens with those places that don't scan the items, but rely on those stupid little rectangle-with-bulges shaped stickers with the price printed on them, and then on clerks punching in the actual prices.
You know, the kind of stickers that either stick so completely to the item that you can't get them off without acetone, or fall off when you look at them funny, depending on how the pricing gun was feeling that day.
Anyway, price swapping is the age-old practice of taking one of the cheap stickers that didn't stick to a low-priced item, and finding a higher priced item that the sticker also only stuck loosely to, and making the swap. Places like the Goodwill and other stores that have highly irregular inventory (e.g. second-hand stores, and some discount-mall stores) will often have to use the individual price sticker per item, and are frequently hit by this problem. (especially if the store is the type that normally puts one price sticker on top of another when marking something down so that it'll sell)
I don't know what country you live in, but here in the US there are no more "production jobs"...factories/plants have all moved production to Mexico, India, and China...
t
ALL? Com'on, there are plenty of manufacturing plants in all sorts of sectors in the US. Hell, even Japanese car companies build plants here.
I don't know if you've noticed, but unemployment is going up...if all technology brought more employment, we would not have such high unemployment...
I havn't noticed, because IT IS NOT TRUE.
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/lf/aat1.tx
Unemployment has historically swung mainly between 4 and 8 %, with a few years in the 1.whatever% and a few near 10. The current rate, 5.5%, is lower than last year's rate, 6%, corresponding to the end of the recession (unemployment, like the economy, is cyclical.)
So, yes, you're full of FUD.
paintball
Ever use the self checkout at supermarkets? Try slapping $0.99 barcodes on packages of chopped meat and chicken breast and have yourself a 5 dollar BBQ!!!
;)
Worked for me
What if you bought helium balloons?
Perpahs I shouldn't post with so little sleep...
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.