One of the most frequent questions I get from clients is how do I start and employee theft investigation? They are more familiar with the steps to take after they know which direction to go, and who to be looking at as possible employee theft suspects. Where to start, and who is raising a red flag, is often more difficult to figure out.

I tend to get a lot of leads through watching my high theft items, and exception based reporting. Sometimes they pan out, but others end up being inconclusive, or a completely different scenario. One way that I have had absolute success with is employee tips. Every employee who has stepped forward to tell me that a co-worker was stealing has turned out to be positive.

Employee tips are hard to generate though. The employees do not want to feel like they are giving bad information about someone. As such, they need to have absolute faith in you- faith that they can trust you and you will keep their confidence and not make them out to be a tattle -tale later on.

One way to help facilitate this garnering of information is to find a way to allow the employees to remain anonymous when they disseminate the information to you. Many companies have an employee tip line set up. It’s usually a 1-800 number that the employee can call from somewhere other than the store, where they won’t be overheard or tracked. 

For more information on employee theft, employee theft investigation or internal theft contact us or call 1.770.426.0547 – Atlanta Georgia

Visit the Loss Prevention Store to purchase CCTV Systems that can help you stop Employee Theft and Internal Theft problems and help with your Employee Theft Investigation.

Anyone can do it. Employee theft happens with every demographic of employee, and every level of employee from janitor, to manager to CEO. Employee theft is basically taking an asset, or resource that holds some kind of monetary value, and depriving the company (the rightful owner) of that asset and financial benefit.

In the news just the other day, a merchandising executive for a popular mall-store clothing brand was sentenced for taking onwards of 25 million dollars in kickbacks from a vendor. Let that sink in for a second. 25 MILLION dollars. That’s a lot of money, even if it was taken over a period of several years.

The basic story goes, this particular merchandising executive entered into a deal with a particular manufacturer. With the agreement to buy a particular amount of merchandise exclusively from this manufacturer, the executive would receive 50% of the profits. The executive’s company lost out on possible profits by using other manufacturers that had better process, or better quality of products offered.

The primary reason that the executive was caught, was due to the manufacturer’s other illegal dealings- leading a trail to this executive and their partnership.

While it is very unlikely that the majority of small businesses would be put in a position to have 25 Million in kickbacks, that doesn’t mean a trusted employee might have their own kickbacks and under the table partnerships with vendors.

For more information on employee theft, employee theft investigation or internal theft contact us or call 1.770.426.0547 – Atlanta Georgia

Visit the Loss Prevention Store to purchase CCTV Systems that can help you stop Employee Theft and Internal Theft problems and help with your Employee Theft Investigation.

Did you know that employee theft is actually pretty common when employees are taking out the trash? While it might seem like a messy way to do it, there is a reason why this method has worked for countless dishonest employees.

Would you want to go routing through a stinky, sticky bag of trash, every shift of every day, just to see if an employee was trying to hide merchandise in the trash bag? Probably not. I know that is not a task I would want as part of my job description. That is what makes it such an effective method of getting merchandise out of the store for an employee to steal.

For the most part, no one wants to check a bag of trash, so an employee will put saleable merchandise in the trash bag/ can and volunteer to take the trash out. The merchandise might be protected from the contents of the trash by being concealed in another bag, or it could be hidden in with paper waste from an office area.

From there the bag goes out a back door- that typically does not have any alarms or EAS identifiers on it. Once the bag is in a dumpster or a compactor they can go back to retrieve it at their leisure. That might be later at night after the store is closed and everyone has gone home, or it could be in an early morning hour before employees start to show up for the day. This method employee theft is pretty low risk compared to other ways of getting stolen merchandise out the door.

For more information on employee theft, employee theft investigation or internal theft contact us or call 1.770.426.0547 – Atlanta Georgia

Visit the Loss Prevention Store to purchase CCTV Systems that can help you stop Employee Theft and Internal Theft problems and help with your Employee Theft Investigation.

In one of our high theft stores, we were loosing a significant amount of power tools from a well-known brand. We did not suspect at first that the cause was from employee theft. We had assumed that the losses came from shoplifters.

The power tools were items that we had historically had shrink problems with. We had countless incidents and recoveries from shoplifters trying to steal these power tools. When we started to loose even more of them, we just assumed we had more shoplifters than normal.

The obvious solution was to beef up our employees during the day to look out for the shoplifters. While we had a few, it was nothing like the shoplifting rampage that had to be happening for us to loose this many tools. It was then that we realized we should probably start an employee theft investigation.

We started our employee theft investigation with the receiving department. The employees were alone at the wee hours of the morning with minimal supervision. We installed a temporary, discreet camera to see what was going on when nobody else was around.

What we saw was employees sifting through the boxes of merchandise coming into the store. As soon as they found the boxes with power tools in them, they would set the box aside.

Near the end of their shift, they would toss the full boxes into the trash compactor. Someone would go to the outside of the building and grab them. This way the boxes were never seen leaving though one of the main doors.

For more information on employee theft, employee theft investigation or internal theft contact us or call 1.770.426.0547 – Atlanta Georgia

Visit the Loss Prevention Store to purchase CCTV Systems that can help you stop Employee Theft and Internal Theft problems and help with your Employee Theft Investigation.

Laws and rules and company policies are created with the safety and well being of a particular community in mind. For the most part people will follow those guidelines because they understand the necessity for a consistent environment. Unfortunately, within every community, club, or business, there are those that feel like they are above the laws and regulations. Frequently, the business wrong doers are ones who commit employee theft.

Just like within any civic organization or community, there are resources in place to help deter and reduce theft. For businesses, having an in house surveillance system is a similar resource. CCTV- closed circuit television- is a common form of surveillance system. It is a system of at least one or more cameras linked via a centralized monitor and recording device.

These systems can be as simple as a single camera overlooking the cash register with a TV and VCR. They can be as sophisticated as multiple cameras that move and tilt under a user’s control- liked via digital screens and recording devices.

Whatever the actual set up is, having a surveillance system in place reduces the likelihood of employee theft. For those that do attempt to steal from your business, there is a greater chance that the thefts had been recorded, and can be used to determine which employee stole what merchandise. This provides a resolution and recourse if you decide to terminate or prosecute that employee.

For more information on employee theft, employee theft investigation or internal theft contact us or call 1.770.426.0547 – Atlanta Georgia

Visit the Loss Prevention Store to purchase CCTV Systems that can help you stop Employee Theft and Internal Theft problems and help with your Employee Theft Investigation.

More often than not, employee theft is a solitary action. Most employees who steal are doing it solo. When they invite in additional parties, they are faced with a whole new set of concerns, mostly surrounding the trust between these partners in crime.

Having more than one person in on a theft job can be problematic. There are questions about whether or not they trust each other. What happens if one of them gets cold feet? What happens if they start to get greedy and want to steal more than the initial agreement was for? Can both employees be trusted to uphold and execute their end of the scheme?

Because of those kinds of concerns, many employee theft cases are ones that have acted solo. The good news is that by using the buddy system within your business, you have a better chance to deter internal theft.

One of the easiest times for an employee to steal is when they open and close down the tills. If there is only one person in the building, temptation has a funny way of sneaking in. When two or more employees are in the building and part of the opening and closing process, temptation is easier to be held at bay. 

The same rule applies for refunds and returns. If an employee can access and perform refunds at will, there is little stopping them from taking advantage of the opportunity to perform their own fraudulent refund. When another employee (or manager) has to sign off and validate those returns, employee theft is less likely.

For more information on employee theft, employee theft investigation or internal theft contact us or call 1.770.426.0547 – Atlanta Georgia

Visit the Loss Prevention Store to purchase CCTV Systems that can help you stop Employee Theft and Internal Theft problems and help with your Employee Theft Investigation.

Power tools are items of merchandise that we have historically had shrink problems with. We had countless incidents and recoveries from shoplifters trying to steal these power tools. When we started to loose even more of them, we just assumed we had more shoplifters than normal, not internal theft.

Since we were loosing a significant amount of tools across the board, we decided that we needed to do a cradle to grave investigation, not necessarily an employee theft investigation. We started to check our receiving reports to find out when the merchandise came into the store, and see if we could track where it went from there.

When we noticed that we were missing items that should have come in on the morning’s truck, but were nowhere to be found, we started to suspect internal theft.We installed a temporary, discreet camera to see what was going on when nobody else was around. What we saw was employees sifting through the boxes of merchandise coming into the store. As soon as they found the boxes with power tools in them, they would set the box aside.

Near the end of their shift, they would toss the full boxes into the trash compactor. Someone would go to the outside of the building and grab them. This way the boxes were never seen leaving though one of the main doors.

We found out that the employees were selling the tools to a local pawn shop to get extra cash.

For more information on employee theft, employee theft investigation or internal theft contact us or call 1.770.426.0547 – Atlanta Georgia

Visit the Loss Prevention Store to purchase CCTV Systems that can help you stop Employee Theft and Internal Theft problems and help with your Employee Theft Investigation.

When you are conducting an employee theft investigation, you want to figure out every avenue that the employee is taking to benefit from your store’s assets.

Even if you think that your employee theft investigation has unearthed exactly what the employee is doing, you might want to continue to pursue every other possible angle the employee could be taking.

It is not uncommon in an employee theft situation that more than one method of theft is uncovered. In one particular case, we had two employees working together.

One would ring up the other, and upon further review, not all of the merchandise taken had been sold. Instead of five items being sold, only one or two would be and the rest of the items would walk out the door.

We later discovered that the extra items were then refunded for store credit. In essence, we were getting the hit by the theft of the item, and then the refund of the item. 

Had we stopped our employee theft investigation at the pass offs at the register, we would have missed the refunds. We also would have missed that there was a third employee conducting the refunds, because they knew the product was stolen.

Once we started observing these employees, we found out that all three of them were actually stealing product and passing off inventory to the others. Without a thorough investigation, we would never have realized just how far the losses were going.

For more information on employee theft, employee theft investigation or internal theft contact us or call 1.770.426.0547 – Atlanta Georgia

Visit the Loss Prevention Store to purchase CCTV Systems that can help you stop Employee Theft and Internal Theft problems and help with your Employee Theft Investigation.

Sometimes discovering employee theft is about looking past the obvious problem and seeing what the real method of theft is about. Cash losses are often covered up by inventory losses based on the method of theft discovered in an employee theft investigation.

If a cashier is stealing by means of refund fraud, they will be driving your inventory shrink losses up, while they are benefiting monetarily from it, not benefiting by directly stealing merchandise.

Here’s how it works: an employee who has access to conduct refunds selects items of merchandise for a fraudulent refund. The merchandise might be an item that is in the area because a customer refunded it earlier in the day. We have also seen employees write down item numbers from merchandise that they want to refund for a specific reason.

Maybe they know the item is below a certain dollar amount that won’t be researched. Perhaps it is an item that is shoplifted frequently, so the employee thinks any losses they create will be lumped in with the rest of the shoplifting losses.

However they pick the items to refund, the next step is the same. They will refund the item, forge any signatures that are required, and take the money that was refunded. It could be cash or a store credit, or even a refund back to his or her own credit card- depending upon what the POS system will allow them to do.

Because the refund is processed through the POS, there will not be a drawer shortage to alert you to the fraud. Instead, you will see inventory losses as a direct result of the refund.

For more information on employee theft, employee theft investigation or internal theft contact us or call 1.770.426.0547 – Atlanta Georgia

Visit the Loss Prevention Store to purchase CCTV Systems that can help you stop Employee Theft and Internal Theft problems and help with your Employee Theft Investigation.

If you suspect that an employee is stealing cash from you, an employee theft investigation should be started as soon as possible. Cash theft can quickly escalate if it is not detected and resolved as soon as possible.

Depending upon the method of cash theft being used determines how much of a financial impact the employee theft has on your overall financial performance. Some employees will make an obvious shortage by taking cash directly from a till without bothering to cover it up in any way. This is generally referred to as the “low hanging fruit”.

Others will devise complex or elaborate schemes to cover their tracks making it far more difficult to pinpoint the exact losses that are occurring. These employee theft cases are ones that eventually get caught but only because they have become so comfortable in their theft that their methods begin to show up on our radar screens.

I had an employee that was taking cash at the end of her shift almost every night. She would search through the journal tape to find cash transactions that had happened earlier in the day. Then she would refund a few of those transactions, and keep the cash. 

It wasn’t until we noticed an increase in our cost of goods that we started to see all of the refunds for cash. She had become so comfortable, that she would refund a few hundred dollars every shift that she worked causing thousands of dollars in losses.

For more information on employee theft, employee theft investigation or internal theft contact us or call 1.770.426.0547 – Atlanta Georgia

Visit the Loss Prevention Store to purchase CCTV Systems that can help you stop Employee Theft and Internal Theft problems and help with your Employee Theft Investigation.