{"id":1349,"date":"2009-12-31T21:06:23","date_gmt":"2010-01-01T03:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/crawler\/?p=1349"},"modified":"2009-12-31T21:08:19","modified_gmt":"2010-01-01T03:08:19","slug":"theft-by-gift-card","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/2009\/12\/31\/theft-by-gift-card\/","title":{"rendered":"theft by gift card"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Courier<\/a>The New York Times<\/a> reports a rise in employee theft via gift cards:<\/p>\n

At the Saks flagship store in Manhattan, a 23-year-old sales clerk was caught recently ringing up $130,000 in false merchandise returns and siphoning the money onto a gift card.<\/p>\n

\u201cGift card fraud is spiking,\u201d said Joshua Bamfield, author of the Global Retail Theft Barometer, an annual international survey of retailers. \u201cTo employees, this is like currency. It\u2019s almost as good as the U.S. dollar.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gift card fraud is growing portion of overall retail theft:<\/p>\n

Employee fraud involving gift cards appears to be growing sharply as retailers struggle to contain overall theft, now estimated at $36 billion a year in the industry, or 1.51 percent of retail sales, according to a leading national study. Even as total sales have been falling, employee theft and shoplifting have been rising across the United States, industry experts say, with occasional arrests making headlines.<\/p>\n

Many of the gift card crimes are straightforward, frequently involving young sales clerks and smaller amounts than the Saks theft. Among the variations of such crimes, cashiers often do fake refunds of merchandise and then, with the amount refunded, use their registers to electronically fill gift cards, which they take. Or sometimes when shoppers buy gift cards, cashiers give them blank cards and then divert the shoppers\u2019 money onto cards for themselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A criminologist who studies employee theft comments:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe retail industry has come to the realization that, as the Pogo comic strip said, \u2018We have met the enemy, and he is us,\u2019\u00a0\u201d said Richard C. Hollinger, the survey\u2019s principal author and a professor of criminology at the University of Florida.<\/p>\n

The most common type of employee theft is \u201csweethearting,\u201d in which cashiers fail to ring up or scan goods that friends or relatives present at the register, Professor Hollinger said. Stealing from the till remains a problem, too. But with gift cards continuing to grow in popularity, they are an increasingly easy target.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And…<\/p>\n

Professor Hollinger says the rate of theft is greatest among retailers with high turnover rates and many part-time workers, who may be less loyal and under more financial pressure than full-time workers.<\/p>\n

He also found higher theft among younger workers. \u201cOlder workers know they have a lot more to lose \u2014 promotional opportunities, health insurance, 401(k)\u2019s and pensions,\u201d Professor Hollinger said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times reports a rise in employee theft via gift cards: At the Saks flagship store in Manhattan, a 23-year-old sales clerk was caught recently ringing up $130,000 in false merchandise returns and siphoning the money onto a gift card. \u201cGift card fraud is spiking,\u201d said Joshua Bamfield, author of the Global Retail […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":335,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39074],"tags":[39116,131,117,76],"class_list":["post-1349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sightings","tag-crime","tag-economy","tag-trends","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/335"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1349"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1352,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349\/revisions\/1352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}