Civil Articles
Theft comes in many forms and fashions. What we will be talking about here in particular is retail theft, internal and external. We may touch on lawsuits as well, since many people use that tactic to gain money illegally from the retailer.
Internal theft is very easy to do and yet seemingly hard to catch. Since most employees know the ins and outs of the establishment they are in the perfect position. They also usually have a great motive – they are ticked off at the business and feel they deserve more. Employees have motive, method and opportunity.
The most common is “under-ringing”, that is, the cashier will purposely not scan an item and allow (in most cases) their friends and/or family to get the item for free. The employee often messes up by covering the UPC code with an item of far lesser value. That is how they get caught, most of the time. It’s not so easy for security personal to scan the video and catch an item not being scanned, but when the security has a copy of the receipt and notices 10-20 kool-aid packets going through, it’s a lot easier to catch.
The second most favorite trick of employees is “till-tapping”. Employees usually mess up by placing their hand into the twenty dollar slot and /or the fifty and hundred dollar slot. What they don’t think about is earlier in the shift, to place a twenty, fifty or hundred into the one dollar slot. A one dollar mistake is easy to forgive when looking for fifty. If the security never see the hand go into the fifty dollar slot, they cannot prove anything. The TRICK to this is to, when making change for a customer, to look as if the employee is putting money into the correct slots…. Also, many employees get caught simply because they don’t think ahead.
If a customer hands the employee a hundred dollar bill, that will show up on the receipt. The other trick to this is to make the money handed to the cashier not seem to be a single denomination, such as a fifty or a hundred. Makes it very hard, near impossible, for the security to figure out what happened to the missing cash. There are all sorts of variations on this and I have come across, I believe, all of them in the 15 years I worked in security. Another thing employees seem to forget is that everything they try or will try has been done before … many times. There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to stealing.
Everyone I ever caught always seemed to think they had it all figured out and was surprised to learn (in many cases) that it was nothing new. Of course, after all those years (and the many spent in law enforcement) there are things I haven’t seen and I wonder why no one has thought of them before.
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Tags: Retail Theft
Posted in Employees · December 5th, 2009 · Comments (0)