SAP VP Arrested In False Barcode Scheme

redletterdave writes "With barcode scanning being so commonplace, nothing seemed out of the ordinary when Thomas Langenbach, the vice president of SAP, was found scanning boxes upon boxes of Lego toys before purchasing them. Little did anyone know, the 47-year-old Silicon Valley executive was actually engaged in a giant scam. Langenbach would visit several Target stores and cover the store's barcodes with his own, so when he would bring the boxes up to the register, Langenbach would pay a heavily-discounted price. For example, this tag swapping allowed him to buy a Millennium Falcon box of Legos worth $279 for just $49. Once he bought the discounted Lego boxes, the SAP executive would take to eBay (under the name 'tomsbrickyard') and sell the items. Langenbach reportedly sold more than 2,000 items on eBay, raking in about $30,000. He was finally caught by Target security on May 8, and he was arraigned on Tuesday on four counts of burglary."

Comments

Typical

[benjfowler]

There's a set of rules for the great unwashed, and another for the 1%.

The marvellous book Freakonomics describes how rich people steal, lie and cheat more often, because their sense of entitlement gets there in the first place.

But I'm not sure I'm allowed to post this. It's election year, therefore we're not allowed to say anything that might offend conservatives, Republicans or rich people.

Re:Common Sense

[vlm]

I would expect them to see that the description that comes up isn't what the product is. The price isn't stored in the bar code, you can't change the barcode to make the product lower priced, but you can print a bar code for a cheaper item and stick it on the expensive one. The till would bring up the product description and price of the cheap item, so they need to be selling a cheaper item with a sufficiently similar description that it would not get noticed by a sleepy drone

When I worked retail management at a supermarket 20 years ago this was NOT the case. Had a little situation with a guy slapping "gound beef" price stickers on beef tenderloin steaks (this is about an order of magnitude diff in price). Deli workers were known to do similar foolishness with price per pound of various products... If the deli girl liked you, you got the cold shrimp pesto salad ($10/lb) for the price of the generic bulk coleslaw ($2/lb).

In the modern era of self checkout grocery stores, especially if you're paying cash and have no loyalty card, every produce item is lettuce per pound. I donno how they stay in business like that.

In the long run I think the "dollar store" concept of $1 per package is going to eventually disappear and instead of RFIDs for each can of soup in the market, they'll simply weigh your cart and charge you a flat rate per pound. The "crab legs and beef tenderloin" problem is solved by making the packaging inconveniently hard to open and inserting bricks or corn or HFCS in the package to bring the cost per pound to a standard weight. Imagine a giant supermarket with only one cashier and checkout takes 15 seconds per cartload. Or packaging deals of cheap bulky stuff with expensive stuff, so buying expensive per pound stir fry meat is impossible alone; you have to buy it with a 10 pound rice sack. Or can't buy steaks or charcoal, must buy steaks and charcoal.

Since everything in walmart/target/whatever comes from China, and everything is made of plastic, I could see charging stuff from those stores based solely on weight. Here, you get 5 pounds of Chinese lead painted plastic. Is it a millenium falcon lego, or a dora the explorer vacuum cleaner, who cares, its 5 pounds of plastic and that'll be $X/pound.