Up In Smoke

Many years ago, I heard this tale of employee theft when I had just started with a new company. I was working for a retailer that had night stocking. There was a small crew and a manager. They worked a typical Monday through Friday shift about 10 PM to 6 AM.

The store had been suffering some strange losses in high dollar products. These high dollar items were big, bulky and extremely heavy. They were also kept under lock and key 24 hours a day. The Loss Prevention team was beside themselves trying to figure out what was going on.

After countless hours of digging through receiving reports and cross checking invoices, there was only one conclusion they could see. This was an internal theft situation. The only problem was they didn’t know who to start their employee theft investigation on.

In a seemingly unrelated issue, they noticed things being moved in their office. Papers would be slid aside on the desk, or pens would be missing. So the LPs installed a night sensitive camera in the office.

It wasn’t long before they saw the night manager come into the LP office in the middle of the night. He shoved the papers aside, and threw his feet up on their desk.  Low and behold, this manager then pulled out a pipe and started to smoke (and it wasn’t tobacco).

Well, this was just the beginning. After the LPs opened their employee theft investigation on this manager, all the pieces started to fit. They watched as the manager would open the doors at night and roll the merchandise out to a waiting truck. As it turns out, the manager was trading stolen store merchandise for drugs.

This manager confessed to tens of thousands of dollars in losses. He also confessed to a drug habit that he had been in rehab previously for, and was battling again. Without the covert camera installed, it would have been a long road to discovering the source of the losses in this employee theft case.

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