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This went down yesterday.
(BG: The guidelines for fraudulent orders were updated on Thursday. Previously the guidelines were fairly strict (too strict IMO), and the burden was on Corporate LP to notify stores of a fraud order. Now, the guidelines have been relaxed and stores can use their judgement; we can email LP with orders that we deem suspicious and they will tell us yea or nay)
An order came in for the 9AM pickup slot...nearly $300 of TP, paper towels, energy drinks and detergent. Looked a bit hinky...then I remembered that we had two previous orders a few weeks apart that were nearly identical (those orders were filled and picked up; I didn't notice a pattern then and the existing fraud guidelines were nigh-useless). I couldn't get the info needed to contact the fraud dept until after the order is invoiced, so I shop it, print the invoice...waitaSECOND. The address on the invoice isn't far off from that of the previous two orders like this--same street. Same item total too. New customer, first time order, same as the other two. I fire off an email with the relevant info from this order to the fraud dept. Only an exempt manager is supposed to handle this stuff, but I didn't know if a manager was going to arrive before the pickup window.
M gets in around 8 and I tell her about the order and that I emailed the fraud dept. She also remembers the previous two orders like this, so we do some digging. She has access to more powerful tools than I, by which she is able to look up the loyalty cards used. Each account only had one order since the first of the year; all 3 orders are nearly identical. We also looked up the addrress on a real estate site..single family home, name of the owner is nowhere close to the name on the order. The rest of the street is what looks like public housing...and the other two building numbers in question do not exist. M decides to do a lookup on not only the phone number from this order, but also the two previous...numbers are registered to completely different people (think: Haitian-sounding name on the order, owner of the phone number is a clearly-Asian individual). Also while the names, addresses and phone numbers were somewhat different, the car color and model was the exact same. M also noted that there are three other pickup stores far closer than we are. Maybe they already got caught by those stores?
While we are doing this I get an email back...DING we has fraud! I'm told to not deliver the order (duh) and that the customer account in question has been deactivated
I think Sm was ready to deliver the order herself to see what the customer looked like.
What I also realized is that when I called the number in the previous orders to let them know the order was ready, I did not get a person and left a message. A private number would call into the store about an hour later asking "is my order ready". I did not reach out to the customer this time at all...no call. Tells me that they were waiting for the store to tell them the order had been filled, which is not typical for this kind of thing. Now I'm wondering if they were using burner phones or spoofing the info.
I did take pics of all three invoices, as well as keeping the customer copy of this newest one for comparison to any future sketchiness.
That was quite a welcome diversion from the usual monotony...I doubt anyone else would have caught this or had the inclination to actually dig into what was going on. M was impressed that I remembered the previous two orders (which is what started us digging into this).
We did have to use our phones to actually run searches; M noted that they basically expect us to look this stuff up, yet any sites we would need to do this (Zillow, reverse phone lookups, etc) are blocked by IT as 'non work related'
(BG: The guidelines for fraudulent orders were updated on Thursday. Previously the guidelines were fairly strict (too strict IMO), and the burden was on Corporate LP to notify stores of a fraud order. Now, the guidelines have been relaxed and stores can use their judgement; we can email LP with orders that we deem suspicious and they will tell us yea or nay)
An order came in for the 9AM pickup slot...nearly $300 of TP, paper towels, energy drinks and detergent. Looked a bit hinky...then I remembered that we had two previous orders a few weeks apart that were nearly identical (those orders were filled and picked up; I didn't notice a pattern then and the existing fraud guidelines were nigh-useless). I couldn't get the info needed to contact the fraud dept until after the order is invoiced, so I shop it, print the invoice...waitaSECOND. The address on the invoice isn't far off from that of the previous two orders like this--same street. Same item total too. New customer, first time order, same as the other two. I fire off an email with the relevant info from this order to the fraud dept. Only an exempt manager is supposed to handle this stuff, but I didn't know if a manager was going to arrive before the pickup window.
M gets in around 8 and I tell her about the order and that I emailed the fraud dept. She also remembers the previous two orders like this, so we do some digging. She has access to more powerful tools than I, by which she is able to look up the loyalty cards used. Each account only had one order since the first of the year; all 3 orders are nearly identical. We also looked up the addrress on a real estate site..single family home, name of the owner is nowhere close to the name on the order. The rest of the street is what looks like public housing...and the other two building numbers in question do not exist. M decides to do a lookup on not only the phone number from this order, but also the two previous...numbers are registered to completely different people (think: Haitian-sounding name on the order, owner of the phone number is a clearly-Asian individual). Also while the names, addresses and phone numbers were somewhat different, the car color and model was the exact same. M also noted that there are three other pickup stores far closer than we are. Maybe they already got caught by those stores?
While we are doing this I get an email back...DING we has fraud! I'm told to not deliver the order (duh) and that the customer account in question has been deactivated
I think Sm was ready to deliver the order herself to see what the customer looked like.What I also realized is that when I called the number in the previous orders to let them know the order was ready, I did not get a person and left a message. A private number would call into the store about an hour later asking "is my order ready". I did not reach out to the customer this time at all...no call. Tells me that they were waiting for the store to tell them the order had been filled, which is not typical for this kind of thing. Now I'm wondering if they were using burner phones or spoofing the info.
I did take pics of all three invoices, as well as keeping the customer copy of this newest one for comparison to any future sketchiness.
That was quite a welcome diversion from the usual monotony...I doubt anyone else would have caught this or had the inclination to actually dig into what was going on. M was impressed that I remembered the previous two orders (which is what started us digging into this).
We did have to use our phones to actually run searches; M noted that they basically expect us to look this stuff up, yet any sites we would need to do this (Zillow, reverse phone lookups, etc) are blocked by IT as 'non work related'
needs that much detergent in the giant jugs? We thought it was maybe a c-store that couldn't get stock (that happens on occasion when we have huge deals on soda), but no c-store I've been in sells giant packs of anything.
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