Retail Scam---Please Read!!!!!

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Originally posted by captaintyinknots
Do you work retail?

Loss prevention is about loss to the store, not to the customer. While they would obviously have an issue with this going on, it is not the job of loss prevention to protect the customer from monetary loss. It would have to be brought to their attention to get anything done about it.

Also, this type of thing would be VERY simple to pull of without anyone being any the wiser.

On the contrary. Loss Prevention is *VERY* concerned about theft to the customer as well.

Cashiers that skim cards, or steal out of the purses that customers leave on the counter and turn away to use their phone or talk to someone else, or get something off a nearby display rack, are things Loss Prevention watches for every day.

If a customer is being stolen from by an employee of a Retail Chain, that Retail Chain is legally liable. If someone sued they could walk away with far more than what was stolen from them, and that obviously affects the bottom line of that Retail Chain. Employees can be far more of a liability to the Retail Industry than Shoplifters are. As such, Loss Prevention spends just as much time, if not more, monitoring their own employees than they do their customers.

Don't believe it? Next time you are in a Retail Store check out how many Closed-Circuit Cameras are focused on each Register! They are not there to just deter Robbery. They are there to also both protect the honest Cashier, as well as to catch the dishonest ones.

Just because a Retail Employee is not contributing to Inventory Leakage doesn't mean that they aren't under the scrutiny of Loss Prevention. Retail Employees are the biggest asset and biggest liability Retail has.

And not even I.T. is immune from their scrutiny either. There is a greater threat of I.T. capturing and logging every packet sent back and forth between the Point of Sale Terminal and the Processing Gateway. Loss Prevention eyes I.T. like a hawk.

About the closest I've seen to any Retail Cashier for a large chain ever getting away with any kind of Fraud before getting caught by Loss Prevention within the week is with Service Contracts. Because of the high pressure on Sales Persons to maintain a large percentage of Service Contracts on merchandise that is sold or face the threat of losing their jobs, many of the less scrupulous will charge the Service Contract to the Customer's Credit Card on a separate transaction after the Customer has left. Since these transactions are MO/TO, they result in Charge-backs if and when the customer discovers them on their Card Statement a month later, but by then they have already counted towards the Sales Persons commission and % of (Service Contracts/Total Sales). In these cases, Loss Prevention can be torn to crack-down on this practice as they are sympathetic to the Sales Persons who are put in an unethical position to begin with, yet they know this practice can cause a negative impact upon their store's Gross Sales and put their Merchant Account in jeopardy if they receive too many Charge-backs.

[edit on 20-11-2009 by fraterormus]

Originally posted by captaintyinknots
Cash advance can be done at any point of sale. however, retailers dont offer it too much because it costs them more to do the transaction than it does with a debit card.

The option to do it is available EVERY time, though.

Interesting in that case since I have never seen it presented in any form. One other thing that was always required for a credit card cash advance at an ATM was entry of a PIN number. You're saying they can bypass this authorization or have no need for it at a checkout counter?