I know a fellow who works in a large electronics store. He says they recently solved a theft problem that had been bugging them for a while. A bunch of inventory–mostly video games–had been disappearing, and they couldn’t figure out how it was leaving the store. I think this place has pretty decent security measures; anyway they determined that it wasn’t being carried out by customers or employees–so where was the stuff?
Eventually someone ratted out the culprit. It was someone who worked in customer service, where she took returned merchandise and paid back cash to the customers returning it. What she had done was get the bar code numbers of products that had been sold, then enter them in as returned and pay out the cash–to herself. So there was actually no inventory being stolen, but only cash. But from the store’s point of view, it looked as if the stuff had been sold, returned, and then lost.
A surprisingly simple scheme, I thought, and she stole over ten grand that way before she was caught.
