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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
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
$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).
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."
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.
I think that he should be happy he didn't get caught in Singapore. I understand that their caning punishment isn't very pleasant.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
...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.
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.
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.
I can get an iRiver for $4.75 and it does OGG as well!
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
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
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
/)
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 $10 and then take home the barcode and fiddle with it until you make a sticker with the same info on it. It rings up to the cashier as "iPod" something, and it takes a rather observant cashier to notice this. Very clever, indeed.
The only reason I caught him was because I noticed he kept peeling something off of the box, which was suspicious. Apparently, he had f'ed up the first sticker's application, and it was crooked, a dead giveaway.
The customer might have been ignorant. There are dirt bags who sell "discount" coupons, much like gift checks to the unwary. It sounds like a good deal for everyone, except the vouchers are little more than coppies made with some image manipulation program. The scam is prevalent in college towns with foreign students.
Other pranks have been committed like this without a profit motive. There have been several cases of people making bogus coupons and emailing them as chain spam. Store clerks often take them without knowing any better.
The silly world of coupons, gift cards and other marketing ploys invites this kind of abuse. That's why they are a stupid idea to begin with. An honest price well advertised is a better deal.
Friends don't help friends install M$ 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.
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.
Lest there be any doubt, I agree with you completely.
It is idiots like him who give the likes of the RIAA their pull with Congress and other lawmakers.
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.
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.
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.
Uh, dude, if someone is selling gas for 10 cents a gallon, you KNOW the price is wrong. That's the issue here. So, if an ATM suddenly decides to spit out money, it's OK to just grab a bunch of it? Taking something that's not yours is theft -- period. Not much difference whether you counterfeit the UPC or the machine screws up. If you know the price is definitely wrong, you are basically stealing.
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.
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
In other words, the label shouldn't convey the information "Charge this customer $X.XX", it should convey "Check for item XYZ... Return price."
That is already how the system works for most items. The scam then is to replace the barcode on the expensive item with an valid barcode from another, less expensive, item.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
...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!
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.
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.
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).
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