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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."
So you expect the drones at the cash register to know the prices of a billion different store items? You'd be tough to work for...
I see old women do this all of the time. Not making their own barcodes, mind you, but swapping the code from the seeded cucumbers to the unseeded ones, or switch the tag from a generic bible and put it onto the fancy one they have their eye on. I wish I wasn't serious.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Surely VP of SAP doesn't need to be doing that?
Some sort of mental illness of thrill-seeking?
The drones at most of these stores don't care; I should know I use to be one and I was the "odd man out" that would notice these things and say something. A lot of times as a cashier speed (items per hour) matters more than accuracy. Your bonus can depend on it, so doing any kind of "checks" hurts a lot.
K Man
Really? Doesn't a VP at SAP make enough money to afford his lifestyle? Is he so greedy that he's gotta do this kind of crap? And where does he find the TIME to post 2000 items to eBay?
Clearly, things at SAP must be doing badly because #1) he's not making enough and #2) He's got plenty of time to sit at work posting shit to eBay.
I don't have time to clean out the junk in my house and post crap to eBay. I barely have time to write this post.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Which part of $8/hour confuses you?
Work just enough not to get fired, paid just enough not to quit.
"His name was James Damore."
Many people steal, but kleptomaniacs have a compulsion to steal independent of need. As this article illustrates, the root of kleptomania is a desire for revenge upon a world that the person feels has treated them unfairly. This includes emotional mistreatment, which is independent of a high salary or success in life.
Futurist Traditionalism
He'll get off easier than some kid downloading a couple songs.
This sounds like brain-dead retarded management policy. Stepping over a dollar to save a dime.
They didn't deserve you.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
How does this compare to the ongoing financial scams being perpetrated on all of us?
Totally different ... he got arrested.
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. This is a pretty high risk method of stealing stuff.
They probably figured someone at the store blew it.
One time we hauled a pallet's load worth of Jones soda out of our local sams club. They were apparently discontinuing carrying it (it hasn't reappeared in the 3 years since). I think they'd *tried* to price it at 12-something (12.38?) per 12 pack. They instead managed to fat-finger it at 2.38 per 12 pack.
We saw it, said, "no possible way." Took it to a scanner, yep 2.38. Took one up to a cashier, "can you price check this?" "2.38" "Seems odd" "That's what the computer says" "Okay, I'll be back" -- and I was, with their whole stock of it.
I don't remember what our total bill was that time, but we bought them out. We had a ziggurat of soda, waist high, in our garage for months... maybe over a year. It was awesome. 20 friends over for BBQ? Bust out the Jones!
Mostly its too much trust in the machine.
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With the "self-checkout" machines popping up everywhere so stores can cut down on employee costs, I'd be shocked if anyone noticed.
I assume he replaced the barcodes with UPCs for cheaper, but similar products so that a cashier wouldn't be particularly suspicious, particularly if it's a line of products with which they're not familiar. The self check might actually be harder to get by than a human, since those have a scale on the bagging side.
I am not a crackpot.
Welcome to retail sales. Management = retarded.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I smell a gambling addiction and the enormous debt that comes with it.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
I should know I use to be one and I was the "odd man out" that would notice these things and say something.
(emphasis added)
I see this line of thinking a lot, and there's a key factor people tend to forget. There's a reason you've moved on to bigger and better things, and a reason some people continue to do that menial work for a decade. When you hire low wage employees for a while, you begin to realize that any "good find" won't be there for long, because they're meant for something more important.
You could be even more ambitious at the Self Serve check-outs! (especially here in Australia)
Actually the self serve checkouts (they don't use them at Target, btw, which might have made a difference in this scheme) would have served to CATCH him. The checkouts use highly accurate product weight data, combined with a scale, to tell if you are sneaking things past the scanner. In the case of this scheme, he would have been putting the barcode for a 10 oz. box of Lego onto a 3 lb box of Lego. The self serve checkout would have a fit as soon as it saw that a 3 lb box appeared when a 10oz on was supposed to.
After a while, I doubt they even notice what it was they rung up. Scan, bag, repeat x N. Total, swipe, next. Try that for five or six 8-hour days in a row, for hundreds of customers, then see how much you notice or care about the merchandise.
I sure hope that's not true. If so, then buying all those boxes of XL condoms from that cute cashier at the drug store was a total waste of money?
This sort of scam is far too common. It's time that stores had updated cash registers that would display a picture of the item when the code is scanned so that it if is obviously different, it has a good chance of getting noticed. It would mean adding a display facing the checkout clerk right above the scanner, and it would require having someone take a photo of each item when it first goes on sale--the latter could be provided by the vendor.
Cash register workers are smarter and more observant than you may think. Purchasing a $280 Lego set for $50 will raise all kinds of eyebrows. Shucks, I bet some of the workers ran back to see if they could buy one themselves. So Tom was definitely an idiot, risking his entire career and reputation like this. I expect that he would have been apprehended much sooner if not for most people's intimidation by technology -- being unaware of how easy it is to create a fake bar code.
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.
I swear, this 1% shit is getting old. A story gets posted to /. about on guy stealing from Target, and suddenly this classist bullshit gets posted.
Why can't it just be that this guy is an idiot with mental problems? Or just an idiot with kleptomania?
m
In the immortal words of Socrates, who said; 'I drank what?'
I worked sales at a car stereo chain (well known in the NW) and was yelled at on the floor, by the manager, for selling the customer the better product instead of the one with more profit. I won't work sales anymore, my favorite line is I would rather chew on broken glass and razor blades than do sales.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
You know what else is (mostly) charged by weight? Transport and storage cost.
Adding all that extra weight (and likely also volume) to expensive items also makes them more expensive to produce, transport and store. The additional cost may very well outweigh the occasional losses due to sociapaths.
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they'll simply weigh your cart and charge you a flat rate per pound
Kind of tricky if you've only bought some helium-filled balloons... Does the store owe you a few pennies?
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The scale on the self-checkout doesn't do any sort of sanity check; it just makes sure the weight changes after scanning an item to ensure you've placed it in the bagging area.
This is not true, or at least, not true everywhere. The local grocery store chain has self-checkouts that reject things that aren't the right weight. From personal experience, I know that if get a coke out of the freezer case and drink half, then try to pay for it, you have to get a store employee to override the system.
I think he's pretty accurate actually. Way back in the day when I was in retail, I loved going to work because then I had time to just let my brain 'switch off' and I could think about whatever I wanted to. It was actually a restful break from classes and homework. Nowadays, I dread going to work, because I have a big boy job and I'm paid to think, not to do.
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Exactly this. You pay people barely above minimum wage and expect them to give a shit? I remember being in a Walmart once and somebody clearly had something stuffed up their sweater, and I mean clearly, it was a large bumpy item. He was standing right in front of the customer service desk and the drone behind the desk didn't bat an eyelid.
Kevin Smith has a podcast "SModcast" called Jay & Silent Bob Get Old and in the very first episode he talks about how they were driving around to stores like Walmart and Target trying to find some particularly rare Star Wars toys that they would then resell through a comic book store or something (I don't remember the specifics but it was something they did RECENTLY). There was no theft involved but it was trivial amounts of cash for a guy who's earned million dollar paychecks for his films. It seemed to be all about the thrill of the chase and nothing about the money. This guy obviously has a serious addiction which is independent of his financial status or his career. The story is just quaint because so many of us can identify with Legos (and how expensive they are) and at the same time it's some kind of big shot executive that gotten busted for petty theft.
I was a manager at a Sams Club in Buffalo NY while at college and there is some good reasoning behind this, even if you/I don't agree with it. Most large retailers goal is to boost profits but cutting expenses; one area to do this is in personnel. If you have fast cashiers, then you need fewer of them. The overwhelming majority of studies in the early to mid nineties showed that the majority of theft was employee related, so to spend a lot of time worrying about customers would be focusing on the wrong area, or as you put it, you would be stepping over millions of dollars to save a few bucks. Another study showed that very few customers who did steal, did it as a one-time deal, it would usually turn in to a pattern and unless your the luckiest man/woman on earth, you're going to get caught eventually.
As a side note, both Target and Walmart are profitable, so they can't be stepping over too many dollars...just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean it's bad.
I once visited England and bought everything by the Pound.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
#14. Anything stolen is pure profit.
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
Same here. As a high school senior, I used to work at (now-defunct) Fretter, which was a local appliance and electronics chain before Circuit City came to our area and closed them down. I was put, predictably, in the computer department. I would get hassled (and also much smaller commission checks) for selling people on the superior AST computers as opposed to the garbage (but higher-profit-margin) Packard Bells.
Honesty was not the best policy if you were trying to make a living as a salesman there. Several of the other guys would simply outright lie to customers, and it blew my mind that management had no problem with it. I swear, one of the guys was a pathological liar... but, man, he did OK for himself.
In my university days, I worked in a shop and got caught in something like this - and was pulled up by the manager for letting this go through.
Seems like the guy had been doing it quite regularily through the week, but the sums involved were tiny. He's swapped the sticker for "thermos flask" (met flsk) for "drinks flask" (pla flsk) and saved himself £5 when he came through to me. (oh, restricted characters we love you!)
I quite fairly pointed out that it is a flask, it came up with a flsk on the screen. Of course I didn't elaborate and say that I'd actually turned my mind off as he was probably the 80th customer that day I'd served and all of whom had probably more than 10 items each, and as long as the barcode beeped I didn't really care, so I kept my job at least.
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
I worked retail management for about 3 years while I was finishing my masters. I don't mean to toot my own horn (okay, I kind of do), but they were desperate to keep me. Why? I was a terrible manager - I let the employees get away with murder, as long as the work got done. I was insubordinate - if the policy was stupid, I didn't follow it. I told the head of the store that I hated my job and I hated the store - every day for two years.
So, why were they desperate to keep me? I could think. The regional actually told me that he would be sad to see me go, because critical thinking is rare in retail. They dangled long-term job offers, travel, higher pay and increased benefits to try to get me to stay. Again, why?
Because I could think. They know that if you have any sort of brain, that retail is just a temporary gig on the road of life, and it makes them sad on the inside.
The guy was making a lot of money off of his theft. Kleptomaniacs typically don't sell stuff on Ebay at high mark-up, they keep, give away, or even donate the stuff the take. Precisely because profit isn't the motive of kleptomaniacs, I believe this guy was just doing it for the cash. Sad, given his apparently position and likely social stature, but he needs to go to jail, not a mental hospital.
I think the bigger questions are "WTF was the VP of SAP doing pulling a cheap ass eBay scam like what your average meth head would pull? Is he a kelpto? Is the company in trouble? Is his pay THAT shitty?" These questions sound more relevant to me than how long he was able to pull this shit off.
Because frankly go to any Walmart at rush hour and the checkout girls ain't looking at shit, they are just rushing that shit across the scanner as fast as they can to try to lower the lines. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised that if in most of these chains they probably get bitched at if the line gets too long so looking at what the scanner pulls up is probably the last thing on their minds.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I worked in a camera chain that went to 100% commission. We had two cameras in the store that paid a negative commission. Somehow they were all defective/damaged packaging/lost in transit/never received. Eventually the home office got the hint and quit trying to re-stock the stores with them, but I have to think they lost more money on that then they would have if they simply ponied up a $0.50 commission on those things so that they were worthless, but not actively hostile to being sold.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
The description isn't a novel.
Slap a barcode for a $39.95 lego-boat on a $129.95 larger lego-ship and the scanner will say something like "lego boat".
I don't know how you expect a bored cashier at minimum wage to catch that.
I'm going to stand up for the "drones" a bit. To a certain extent pay peanuts get monkeys. But in fact there are a lot of people out there who are not hugely bright or who even have "learning difficulties", but who can do boring jobs for extended periods and are pretty accurate and reliable. I worked for a pharmaceutical manufacturer for a bit while at U, and they looked for people like this and gave them jobs in packing and QA. The difference is that instead of treating them like Walmart they worked hard to keep them motivated, told them that their work was valuable and that all the work of the chemists and the engineers was wasted if the wrong product got out of the door, and made sure that students like me understood this, and that we were easily replaceable while they weren't. They are "good finds" who won't move on. They are not stupid, they just have limitations that are different from those of, say, social ineptness. A lot of that is automated nowadays, but there are still a few, mostly smaller places without the Walmart/Bain/you name it view of replaceable monkeys, and they are often successful because they don't get the level of staff theft and they appeal to older people who value helpful and friendly staff.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Another piece of this article overlooked is the "caught by Target security". Target has some of the most comprehensive and detailed customer data of any retailer. If you're on their coupon mailing list, the mailer you get from them is customized to you; they have a profile on you that's extremely accurate and their mailers have 2-3 floating pages, where the one printed to go to your address will have coupons based on the things someone in your profile would buy, and it's highly segmented and targeted to a level that's almost creepy; it can apparently predict if a woman is pregnant and when you're due, and can start sending you targeted ads: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/
Last month my car got broken into and my girlfriend's purse stolen; we were at an event and didn't get back to my car for about 5 hours after it happened. The perps took all her credit cards and started running them up, howeverher main one was canceled because they bought several items at Target which were outside of her normal profile (lots of junk food apparently, she's a very healthy eater), so they called AMEX and alerted them to fraud within 10 minutes of the fraudulent purchases, and AMEX shut her card down; we know because it got rejected at the next store they went to. They also pulled up the security tapes and were able to give video from their security cameras to the police of the guys checking out at the register. While we recovered and got all charges canceled, that was uncanny what Target was able to do to stop this crime in a matter of minutes.
And what's he making now?
License plates. drrrTISH!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I think you might have missed the whole "title inflation" phenomenon that's been going on for the last 20 years or so. Don't be ashamed. Whomever wrote the "fine" article made the same mistake, giving the impression that the accused was the second in command at SAP Global, or something.
His official title is "Vice President, SAP Integration & Certification Center (ICC)". That means he's not an executive VP at all, and his title is specific to only one of SAP's businesses. That puts him in the highest rungs of "middle management". He probably reports to the guy who reports to the guy who reports to the COO, an actual executive.
Regarding his compensation, it would be solidly in the 6 figure range. So $30k would be more meaningful to him than a mere "rounding error", but it wouldn't make difference in his standard of living, in any real sense. Having been around the block a few times, he was probably bored as hell at his job, his wife probably ignores him, and he was probably sick of the fact that his kids were the only ones in the house who had any excitement in their lives at all. It had probably been so long since he felt he was even alive, he needed the adrenaline rush just to check and see.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Sounds like when I worked at a gas station in high school and college. I was the assistant manager and was frequently offered my own store, probably 5 times in 3 years, but didn't want to spend my life managing a gas station only to eventually become a district manager. Early on I learned that a good regular, non management, retail employee was one that wouldn't steal, showed up on time, and could fog a mirror. The overnight guy met these criteria but when I first started I though he was worthless as he never got anything done. When I bitched to the manager he educated me that Ron was the ideal overnight gas station attendant as he loved working the overnight, didn't steal, showed up every day, was on time, and stayed awake. Later in my job there as assistant manager I trained a number of managers on how to manage a gas station. The sad part was how many of them had a 4 year management degree and thought they were gods gift to management. Problem was that you can't just tell a high schooler to go plunge out a toilet and expect them to do it, they need to see you go plunge one out first. Also they never understood that you can't just fire a high schooler until you have a trained replacement unless you want to pick up their shifts. The worst manager trainee we had I ended up telling him "I turned down the job you went to college to get so that I could go to college so I won't have to manage a fucking gas station the rest of my life." because he was such a condescending ass hole. One of my managers at the gas station also pointed out that he would much rather higher college students and pay them a slightly higher wage and also the tuition reimbursement (it was from the company and something like an extra $1/hr) because they were motivated workers, wouldn't just up and quit, and would show up for work unlike those who only graduated high school.
Time to offend someone
My thoughts on why Lego is not like RIAA:
When my 5 year old put his stickers from a set all over a box, I emailed Lego, and they sent me a new sticker sheet. I had offered to pay but they said, no charge. Same thing with a couple of parts that he lost. When my five-year-old scratches his Just Bieber CD... well I sure as hell don't try too hard to replace it. But if I did ever want to replace a big label CD, I doubt they would be accommodating.
Lego allows Peeron to keep scans of all the old instruction manuals online. Even though copyright hasn't technically expired, they realize that they're not likely to print old instructions. They're too busy printing new instructions. Compare that to the RIAA that sends C&D letters to lyrics websites, and tries to shut down guitar teachers from posting lessons online.
BrickLink, LugNet, etc. don't get harassed by Lego. As long as they don't use the name Lego in the website, pretty much anything goes. They have an interest in making sure the AFOL stay active. We go on to raise the next generation of Lego fans that way. :-)
Yeah. Most people aren't sociopaths. The stores would be much better off with face recognition software and a database of CEO photos, which triggers an alarm.
Have you ever tried to do 3D printing? It will be quite some time before a RepRap will be able to produce the tight tolerances required for the soul-inspiring "snap" of Lego bricks. Even half of the no-name brand bricks can't get it right. Some of them can't even control tolerances enough to keep the bricks from falling apart or not be able to snap together in the first place. It costs a lot more money to make a 1.00 mm part than a 1.0 mm part.