Employee Theft: Scanning and Scamming – Atlanta Georgia

While working as a loss prevention manger, I witness acts of employee theft almost on a monthly basis and in some months more often.  I recall one case of employee theft that had me baffled.  After observing a pattern of the same customers purchasing large amounts of merchandise at one specific associate’s register.  When this associate would be working without fail a group of individuals would come in and go through the associate register to be checked out.  My years of experience in retail said that something was not right and that this might be a case of employee theft.  This instinct, lead me to begin an employee theft investigation.

During the employee theft investigation, I watched the subject process the transaction of the group that had been seen only using her her register to checkout. The transaction looked normal, the associate appeared to pass all the merchandise across the scanner and the customers appeared to tender their payment.  In an effort to fully analyze the transaction and conduct a thorough employee theft investigation, I reviewed the electronic journal for that register transaction.  What I saw was that none of the merchandise observed on camera being scanned by the associate matched the merchandise shown on the receipt.

When I concluded the employee theft investigation, I interviewed the associate about why the merchandise being scanned did not match the merchandise going out the door. I ask the associate were they aware of our internal theft policies and had they committed internal theft while working at the store.  The associate admitted to committing internal theft while being employed and said that they used the price labels from less expensive products to scan the more expensive items. The associate admitted to taking about $3500.00 in merchandise from the store.  After identifying the associate accomplices in the surveillance video, the police were able to recover some of the stolen items.

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