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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."
If it doesn't happen often, why would a store put in a permanent fix for the problem?
They already have. It's called RFID. If you have been around this site for the past two years, you've probably heard of it.
It's much harder to forge an RFID tag unless you have the private key of the transmitter, or have some high-tech spy equipment that can capture the entire negotiation stream between the transmitter and target to crack it later... and the cost of doing either of these things would be prohibitive to anyone who wants to make money off shoplifting (you'd be better off planning a bank robbery).
Yep, it was the same store. I live in Boulder, and we only have one Target. I'm tempted to swing by his dorm and ask him if he's always been this stupid, or was born that way....
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
If you do or did work for Target, then you should also know that those IPods are kept under key lock and are handled by whomever is working in the Electronics Department from the moment they are taken out of the lock case to the moment for which they are paid. I held the position of Electronics Specialist at a local Target store; I would be quite furious if someone from my team would let an IPod leave the store at $4.99.
Quite frankly, I am baffled as to how this person could have managed to place a fake barcode on the IPod itself. For starters, the barcode on the IPod is a very slim one burried beside two other barcodes - the serial and one other one which I can't remember. When an IPod is taken out of the lock cases, they are either paid for at the department's registers or they are taken up to the front lanes and placed in a special location. The cashiers, or at the very least, the GSTL should have kept an eye on this IPod and whatever was left up there. The only way I can imagine this could be done is if the person asked for the IPod to be taken up front, managed to grab it without anyone noticing, placed the fake barcode on the device, then put it back and went to stand in one of the lane's lines to have the unfortunate cashier grab it and ring it up. But at this time of the year, my old store (and myself) would have made it a rule by now not to bring any locked merchandise up to the checklanes and force the guests to pay for it back in the department or hold on to it in a locked drawer by our "boat" or desk area where the registers are kept until the guest was ready to pay for it. There should have been no way for this person to place a fake barcode on the IPod without a Target Team Member noticing, let alone have it ring up at such a price and not fool the Team Member.
I'm also having a hard time trying to understand how the fake barcode was even detected by the systems. Target uses the DCPIs of the item, a 9 digit department-class-item relationship that looks like xxx-xx-xxxx. They don't use the UPCs; they match them to the DCPIs. All of these are kept in a system database; if you enter one that isn't on that database, it comes up on the registers saying "Item not on file." So he had to have used one that matched up with an existing DCPI at $4.99 which means the item description and even the department/class number should have been totally different from what the standard IPod's barcode comes up with.
I believe whatever Target store this was, their STL, ETL-AP, ETL-HL, and Electonics Team Lead should all be questioned about their neglegance, not just the person who rang it up at that price with a fake barcode and let them get away with it.
See the actual police report and his statement @ http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/1202052boy1.h tml