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This is a story from when I worked at a games store back in 2006.
A thief managed to walk out of one of our stores with nearly $1500 in games without pulling a weapon or threatening anyone and he managed to do it so convincingly that the company wasn't actually alerted to the theft until the next day.
It also wasn't an inside job, although an employee was terminated due to the incident.
What happened was a well dressed man with a suit and briefcase came in one day claiming he was employed by one of the companies we buy games from (Think Activision, EA, Blizzard, etc) and had been sent for an important reason.
According to him, they had discovered that a rather large portion of games they had recently manufactured were defective and he'd been sent to collect the defectives. He assured the employee (who had only been on the job a couple of months) that replacements would be sent out promptly and that he was being sent to pick up the games to expedite the turnaround and get functioning product back in the store ASAP. He had an ID badge with his photo and the name of the company, a list of games including our internal SKUs (not hard to forge if you put some effort into it) and an official looking work order with a forged signature from our DM. The thief had done his homework so well that he'd properly spelled the DM's name on the sheet.
So you can probably guess what happened. The new CW let this guy walk off with a whole bunch of games because they were apparently defective. He was not told by the store manager or assistant manager that this would be happening and assumed it was legit because of DM's signature.
The scammer also left a very official looking business card with a name, a contact number and an e-mail and told the employee that he could have the store manager call him if there were any concerns about what was happening (as you might have guessed the phone number was disconnected and the e-mail address was phony).
He didn't bother to call anyone after it happened either. The theft was found out the next day when the employee who let it happen told the manager what had gone down.
The DM was absolutely furious about it, not just because of the dollar losses but because of the employee who let it happen and the store manager who, in DM's opinion, didn't train the employee well enough to be able to spot a con like this. So the employee got fired and the manager got a written reprimand.
This info was related to me by my manager at the time. After this incident, all stores in our region were alerted to be on the lookout for these kinds of schemes and be aware that that unless something is leaving the store in a customers hands or on a UPS truck, it should NOT be leaving the store.
I know the incident was reported to the police and the guy was caught on the security cameras, but I never heard of the scam being tried again in our area and I don't think they ever got the guy who did it.
A thief managed to walk out of one of our stores with nearly $1500 in games without pulling a weapon or threatening anyone and he managed to do it so convincingly that the company wasn't actually alerted to the theft until the next day.
It also wasn't an inside job, although an employee was terminated due to the incident.
What happened was a well dressed man with a suit and briefcase came in one day claiming he was employed by one of the companies we buy games from (Think Activision, EA, Blizzard, etc) and had been sent for an important reason.
According to him, they had discovered that a rather large portion of games they had recently manufactured were defective and he'd been sent to collect the defectives. He assured the employee (who had only been on the job a couple of months) that replacements would be sent out promptly and that he was being sent to pick up the games to expedite the turnaround and get functioning product back in the store ASAP. He had an ID badge with his photo and the name of the company, a list of games including our internal SKUs (not hard to forge if you put some effort into it) and an official looking work order with a forged signature from our DM. The thief had done his homework so well that he'd properly spelled the DM's name on the sheet.
So you can probably guess what happened. The new CW let this guy walk off with a whole bunch of games because they were apparently defective. He was not told by the store manager or assistant manager that this would be happening and assumed it was legit because of DM's signature.
The scammer also left a very official looking business card with a name, a contact number and an e-mail and told the employee that he could have the store manager call him if there were any concerns about what was happening (as you might have guessed the phone number was disconnected and the e-mail address was phony).
He didn't bother to call anyone after it happened either. The theft was found out the next day when the employee who let it happen told the manager what had gone down.
The DM was absolutely furious about it, not just because of the dollar losses but because of the employee who let it happen and the store manager who, in DM's opinion, didn't train the employee well enough to be able to spot a con like this. So the employee got fired and the manager got a written reprimand.
This info was related to me by my manager at the time. After this incident, all stores in our region were alerted to be on the lookout for these kinds of schemes and be aware that that unless something is leaving the store in a customers hands or on a UPS truck, it should NOT be leaving the store.
I know the incident was reported to the police and the guy was caught on the security cameras, but I never heard of the scam being tried again in our area and I don't think they ever got the guy who did it.
I AM the evil bastard!
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