Drowning in Merchandise
From Madison, Wisconsin comes this report of three women arrested for shoplifting. “Drowning in merchandise,” said a police spokesperson. “There was brand-new merchandise filling the entire passenger compartment of the car.”
"There was brand-new merchandise filling the entire passenger compartment of the car," according to police. (note: image is not car apprehended)
The arrested women said they were part of a group that targeted a particular group of stores. Police filled up “seven or eight” large garbage bags with items from the car.
Converting Stolen Goods to Money
After being arrested one of the women told police how easy it was to return items to stores to get gift cards. In fact, police found gift cards from several stores along with the stolen merchandise.
This is just one of the ways thieves convert your stolen goods to cash.
What Can You Do?
Here are a few suggestions to help fight this type of theft.
- Protect Your Merchandise – as with all aspects of shoplifting, your normal loss prevention techniques will make it more difficult to steal from you.
- Ask for Receipts for returns – and offer gift receipts when requested.
- Notice Unusual Return Patterns – Do you have customers who seem to return an unusual number of items?
- Returns from Other Stores in Your Chain – If you are a chain store, take notice of unusual patterns of returns from your sister stores.
- Keep Abreast of Thefts in Your Area – Do returns match items reported stolen from area stores?
- Re-tag Returned Merchandise – If you use Electronic Article Surveillance, Benefit Denial or similar anti theft devices, be sure to tag returned products before putting them back on your shelf.
Please share your techniques to help fight the shoplift/return cycle.
Tags: articles, procedures, returns
November 14, 2011 at 10:43 am |
[...] We’ve discussed the problem of return fraud in the past. For example, look at our Shoplift/Return Cycle article. It’s a related problem. But with wardrobing the product is actually purchased, though [...]