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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
...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.
Perhaps you've never worked at such a fine retail establishment as Target, but as someone who has I will tell you that the cashier was most likely not stupid, he just simply didn't care. He doesn't get a bonus for catching theives like the guy with the $4.99 iPod, and after ringing up thousands for purchases for hours on end, day after day, he probably just got tired and didn't really notice the iPod ringing up cheap. Personally I never paid attention to what items were being purchased or what the computer said they cost. I just ran them over the scanner and gave change like the cash register told me to.
That being said, if this guy had any brains, he would have gone to a different store. At the end of the day, inventory gets taken and if items sold don't match up to cash in registers, there's a problem. His scheme could have (not definately, but there is a chance) been discovered, and then it would have been a simple matter of looking at the security tapes and seeing who the offender is. We had a similar incidence like this at our store when a woman rode a $500 bike out of the store while the security guard was one lunch brake (yeah, great security practices there huh?). We pulled the tapes and saw who it was, and sure enough, the same woman comes in a week later trying to shoplift stuff by putting it in her backpack. She was arrested in short order and we got the bike back soon enough too.
Just goes to show people don't become criminals because they're smart.
Check out my website: Playfully Clever
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
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He faces a felony count of forgery and two misdemeanor counts of theft.
I find it interesting that forgery was the charge that carries the greatest clout. Looks like he would have been better off if he just stuck the iPod under his jacket. It almost seems like he's being punished more for subverting the store's security system than for the actual theft of the property. Is it normal to charge a bar-code switcher with forgery? In the lego case it seems as if he was charged with theft rather than forgery.
Either way, you're right...he's going to have a tough time finding a job after college with this on his record...
Ride the skies
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.
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.
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.
I don't know about record stores, but at most places I shop it seems that the cashiers know nothing about the products that they sell, so how would you expect them to know anything about the right price?
While we're talking about lack of product knowledge, let me say that I get kind of tired of asking for help at a store only to be told that I should read the box. I shop online more now because I can actually get the information I need about the product. I've also been known to stand in a store and call the 800 number on the box to ask the manufacturer questions. It's really quite sad.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
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
When I was in high school two years ago, I worked as a cashier at an urban Target. As you can imagine, it had a fairly high shoplifiting rate, and people tried to pull scams like these all the time. Typically, it would manifest itself as someone taking a bar code from something like a potted plant (which had sticker barcodes) and sticking it over the real one. From the first time that I first noticed this a couple weeks after I started, to a year and a half later when I left for college, I probably saved the company about $3000 through catching this fraud alone. The trick was to glance at the display for all items that looked expensive to me. However, aside from the pat on the back and the free $10 DVD that I got after saving the store $300 in one transaction, I never saw a dime of that. (Actually, that $300 one was really clever: he managed to graft a couple of those souped-up Playstations with the label of a regular, old Playstation, so that come transaction time, the computer still said "Playstation.") Granted, assets protection (i.e., the security team) loved me, and it probably didn't hurt me come review/raise time. I never even had the satisfaction of seeing any of those people get arrested, because once they noticed that the jig was up, they found an excuse to leave as quickly as they could. (Also, Target had a policy of not arresting until they had definitive proof of shoplifting, i.e., camera footage. In this case, they'd have to trace back the person's motion through the cameras to when the label was fraudulently placed, a fairly time consuming process. Otherwise, they could get sued.)