The most basic employee bag check is one where all working employees have someone look in their personal bags and purses any time the employee leaves the store. This should include everyone, including managers. The thought behind it is that an employee is less likely to try and conceal stolen merchandise in their personal purse or bag when they know someone will be looking at the contents later.

A closing manager should have another employee look in their bag before they leave. It is both a deterrent for the managers and leading by example. Having a manager’s bag checked shows that no one is beyond the reach of this policy.

Some companies order a clear purse for employees to use while at work.  It is another way to deter employee theft. Everyone can see exactly what is inside the bag from any angle.

This may or may not work for your store. Some employees may feel like their privacy is violated because everyone, not just a manger, can see the employee’s personal items. These bags are also an additional expense that may cost you more than they are worth.

Along with just having an employee’s bag checked, purchases should also be checked against the receipt. Employees may be tempted to add additional items to their purchase after the transaction is done, thinking no one will question a bag of merchandise that they saw the employees pay for earlier in the shift.

Finally, if you have multiple doors to your building, make one door a designated employee entrance. It will make it easier for your managers to check all bags, and makes any violators looking to skip out on a bag check more obvious.

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 employees are not appreciated they will look for somewhere else to go. If their efforts are not being rewarded through praise or a raise they begin to question why they should even bother putting in the effort.

This is where most employees look at one of two options. They might eliminate the position they are in through a lateral transfer, promotion, or leave the company entirely.

Another alternative is when employees begin to feel like they have been robbed out of other compensations for their hard work, they may devise a plan to compensate themselves. Some employees compensate themselves by beginning to steal time. 

They may start taking longer lunch breaks, leaving early or coming in late. They do not have the same loyalty and drive to be the best and their hours worked can start to reflect that change. Time theft is the most easily justified form or theft by employees.

When an employee sees other employees coming in late without recourse from management, they feel like they can do it to, and also can get away with it.

Other employees will begin to take company supplies, whether they need them or not. Extra pens, paper, can eventually escalate into company computers, tablets or other electronics. Even more employees will steal cash or steal merchandise. They might take it directly, or hand the products off to friends or family.

Theft created by employees is often the byproduct of feeling unappreciated. The employees will overcompensate themselves because they feel as if they are deserving of it.

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 order to reduce internal theft from embezzlement maintain a check and balance system for everything you do. Have a periodic audit or reconciliation, even if it is once a month. Have someone else do the audits, someone who was not involved in the transactions.

Embezzlers have spent hours figuring out your systems and their inefficiencies. They have been there long enough to know what your hot points are and what things are routinely let slide. From there they devise a plan that works around what you watch and what you don’t.

They are especially difficult to detect because the employees that embezzle are ones that have been working the system for years. In fact, because they have been around for years, they are often the ones that have been promoted to jobs with more responsibility and access, and are in a trusted management position.

Frequently, we catch on to these embezzlers because of an employee tip. Another common way to unearth embezzlement is by opening up a blanket employee theft investigation. That is one where we take a look at all of the employees and check for signs that might be a red flag.

We can also catch on if we notice an employee that is living beyond their means. If they are spending money that you know you don’t pay them enough to have, they might be supplementing their income elsewhere- like from your coffers.

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.

Many years ago it was standard practice to write a check for everything. Credit was an exception used for major purchases, or perhaps a special in- house financing in a department store. The down side to writing checks was that they took so long to process, that bad checks were an extremely prominent and an easy form of employee theft and fraud.

It was something that we always watched out for, employees who would write a bad check. There were even employees who would kite/ float checks. It was a simple process, but one that took dedication to maintain the process.

An employee would write a check and get cash. They would not have enough money in their bank account to cover the dollar amount of the check. So the cash they got from the check would get deposited into their account. Deposits would post faster than it would take the check to clear, however, they still needed to cover the bad check they had written.

They would write a second check and get cash. Then they would deposit that cash into their accounts. This cash would be enough to cover the first check, but not the second. So they would have to do it again, and again…

This would be a way to supplement their account in between paychecks. Once they had their paycheck deposited, the paycheck would cover the bad checks that had been written.

We don’t see employee theft or employee theft investigations for bad checks these days. What we do see is the same process with deposits. Cash is taken out of a deposit and cash from the next day’s deposit covers it up. They will take the money out of each deposit until they can make up the difference with their paychecks.

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.

 It was by chance that we discovered our latest internal theft case. We had just received a shipment of a particular new product. A few days later, we were out of stock on that item, but we didn’t see the sales we should have on it.

After beginning to review the journal tape, we noticed that at the end of the day there had been several voided cash transactions. Many of which had involved this new item. When we started to suspect internal theft, we began to review journal tapes from other days. 

 We noticed a pattern. A particular closing manager would have several cash transactions voided out just before store closing. Some of the transactions were ones that had occurred earlier in the day before she even got to work.

 We watched video from the cash office during her closing shifts and discovered that she would take money out of the tills and put it in her purse.

 She admitted that she would search the journal tapes for cash transactions and then post void them out. She would take that dollar amount in cash for herself-, which is why there wasn’t a cash shortage. Because the customer was leaving with the merchandise the shortage came from the inventory losses.

 In essence she had eliminated the sales causing the inventory to leave the store unaccounted for. Because the sales were originally paid for in cash, the transaction void caused unaccounted for cash in the register. The employee took the cash for her own thinking that she had eliminated the trail to her employee theft.

 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.

There is a saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I am not sure where to go with fool me a third time. In this unusual case of internal theft reported on by the Huffington Post that is exactly what happened.

A 17-year-old boy was fired from his job at a chain retailer for stealing money. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough for this now terminated employee. The teen went to a second store in a nearby town on Black Friday.

He told them he was there from a different store to help with Black Friday. They put him at a register. He worked for about six hours and took all the cash that he made. That haul totaled about $3,000.

When the manager realized (after the fact) what happened, he notified police and the company’s corporate headquarters. Local authorities launched what would be another employee theft investigation.

Managers at a third store were unaware of what was going on when the teen when he showed up there in December. He presented himself as a general manager and said he needed to run some audits on some of the registers and on the store.

He was even able to convince one of the store’s managers to take him into the cash room. While in the cash room, the manager was called to assist another employee.

It was during that time that the teen stuffed his pants with around $36,000.

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.

For some employees, employee theft is limited to the company profits and assets. Since one of the biggest reasons an employee steals is because they feel the company owes them something, the company is the sole target of this “compensation”.

For a select few, employee theft is more about the act of stealing and the wants behind it. This can unfortunately degrade quickly past the point of just stealing from the company to stealing from fellow employees.

These employee theft investigations are harder to work, because there is a different pressure to solve the case.

When an employee has their personal possessions taken, it is more than just that possession that is taken. An employee takes the losses personally. They feel victimized and they feel let down and betrayed. An employee comes to work with an overall assumption that when they leave their belongings (coats, purses, cell phones) in a designated employee area, their belongings are protected and safe.

When something is stolen, they no longer feel that they are safe and that their employers are to blame for not maintaining that safety. The employees then take it upon themselves to protect their things.

This leads to broken trust and broken policies. Since the employee no longer trusts you, they will begin to stash their bags behind the POS where they can keep an eye on it, or take their cell phone on the floor.

Now you are faced with the employee theft investigation, broken policies, and you are a short leap away from other employees seeing what is going on and they too will begin to make up their own rules of governance.

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.

One of the more common theft items for many retailers is fragrance and cosmetics. It’s not just shoplifters that employers need to be worried about too. It is the employee theft of these items that can create a bigger financial shortfall in inventory losses.

Let’s start with why these items are taken. We can begin with the price- for most major fragrance labels, even a small one-ounce bottle can fetch close to fifty dollars. Even though cosmetics can be a low price point, ask any woman how many different products they use. It can be an overwhelming amount of different items of makeup, each with a five to ten dollar price- for the moderate drugstore brands. Higher end products can increase in price exponentially depending on the designer and type of product.

Beyond the initial price, these are consumable items. They need to be replenished with regularity ranging from once a month to once every four to six months. If you have employees that regularly wear or use these beauty items, they can potentially incur hundreds to thousands of dollars worth of product in a year’s time.

From an employee theft perspective, stealing these items is a way to maintain, or enhance, a life style while decreasing out of pocket expenses. It was not uncommon for me to resolve employee theft investigations where employees sought out employment at stores that carried their preferred brand of cosmetics just so they would have unending access to them.

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.

One of the best ways I have found to do an employee theft investigation is to find the beginning of a paper trail and then start to follow it. At my company, we use merchandise credits/ store credits for returns made without a receipt.

A real customer who purchases an item, loses or throws out their receipt and later needs to return that item are given a store credit/ merchandise credit. They are generally ok with this because they will either be replacing the item they are returning, or will have other shopping they can do at our store.

From an employee theft perspective, many employees who commit a fraudulent return will then be issued a merchandise credit. There is no receipt because there was never a sale to begin with. The employee will then use the credit to purchase more items. Frequently they will use their employee discount along with this credit.

That is were the paper trail begins. We track employee purchases and can also track a merchandise credit’s history. When we see an employee with the credit but no corresponding purchase history, we know something is not right.

After starting with a single merchandise credit, we can find that it will lead up to other merchandise credits that the employee uses. From there, the employee theft investigation doesn’t take long before we can figure out the pattern of what this employee is doing and how they are causing losses to our store.

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.

The most recent employee theft investigation we conducted started out with a missing bag of chips.

We saw an employee eating a bag of chips and wondered if she had paid for it. When we reviewed the journal transactions, we saw that she did in fact ring up the bag of chips. However, she had paid for those chips with a store credit.

It was then that we suspected this might be an employee theft case.

This particular store credit was issued about fifteen minutes before the employee paid for her snack. When we went back and reviewed the refund that generated the store credit, we discovered that the employee had created a fraudulent refund.

She rang up an item that was sitting close to the register for the return. It was not her item to refund, nor did a customer initiate it. We knew right then that the employee theft was not from the chips, but from a fake refund transaction conducted by the employee.

We questioned the employee about the transaction and she admitted that she needed the money to buy food for her and her son. It was a very sad situation that she was in. Unfortunately, her pride kept her from asking for help. She decided that her only option was to steal to make ends meet.

While the theft was inexcusable, we were able to get the employee to some places that could help her and her son out until they could find better times.

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.