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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
Oh. Well, in that case, off you go.
...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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.