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ssb
Feb 16, 2006

WOULD YOU ACCOMPANY ME ON A BRISK WALK? I WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK WITH YOU!!


I thought I'd posted this story but I hadn't. This was another one from the gas station back in the late 90's, I would have been 18 for this. [fake edit: apologies, no time to edit this run-on mess]

I worked at a gas station in a small town in Wisconsin after following one of my managers over from the grocery store during the Great Exodus after corporate bought it and ruined what was a great grocery store. There wasn't a lot to the job, so I was pretty good at it after a few weeks and started closing on my own and everything. I also ended up being asked to train a new employee, who was a girl that was in my class but that I didn't know super well.

By and large, she was a decent person, and she picked up most stuff quickly, but her math was atrocious and she could never ever get the balance sheets to match up for drawer count and credit cards and everything. Initially it was obvious math mistakes and it was easy to help her fix it, but after a couple weeks it started getting worse. A couple days in particular I couldn't reconcile it at all, but it was in a super weird way, like the numbers that couldn't be fudged (they came directly out of the register, it wasn't a drawer-count issue) didn't add up right. I mentioned it to the supervisor and she couldn't figure out what was going on either. I couldn't close every night, so they ended up signing her off for closing anyways with the idea that they'd fix it in the mornings.

About 3-4 days later, I get a call from the local police department asking me to come in. They wouldn't say what it was for, but said it was related to the gas station, and said they just had some questions for me. I called my boss at the gas station and asked her what the gently caress, and she said she had no idea either, only that a bunch of police came by the station and seized a bunch of paperwork and told her not to talk to anyone.

Wondering what the gently caress, I went to the police station, and they took me into an interview room. There were I think 2 local cops that I knew, and then some other guy in a suit that I didn't recognize. They started asking me questions about the closing process, and how the balance sheets were done, etc. Then they asked me about the girl I trained, and how that went, and so forth. They then brought out a couple of the balance sheets as like some sort of "GOTCHA!" trump card and asked if that was my handwriting along with hers on it, expecting me to crack about something I guess.

I didn't crack, of course, because it was my writing and I told them so, as well as why my writing was on it. They were still being super cagey, but one went to call the boss to verify my story, and she of course did. They finally decided I really had no idea what the gently caress they were going on about, and explained what was going on.

It turned out the guy I didn't know was some dude from the FBI. Apparently, the girl I'd been training was using credit card numbers/expirations that she would get out of the register's internal paper tape (this was late 90's, that's how it worked on these) to buy lottery tickets for herself. The system wasn't really supposed to allow this, since you can't legally buy lottery tickets with anything besides cash, or couldn't at the time at least. She ended up doing it in some buggy way that the sale would like half-process, and the lottery system was satisfied, but it didn't log it right. This was how the numbers that couldn't be fudged were fudged, basically she managed to stumble on some register bug. She apparently did this when I was cleaning a bathroom or dipping tanks or whatever. Because my handwriting was all over the balance sheets when I was trying to figure out how to reconcile it, they thought I was in on it and that they'd broken up some sort of high school credit card theft ring. My manager was LIVID that they hadn't gone to her first in any meaningful way other than asking her for a shift calendar. I was pissed because the police had also made me give a handwriting sample (useless, since they made me do cursive, which I never used even then) and take fingerprints and I was too intimidated to tell them to gently caress off or ask for a lawyer, plus the whole interrogation thing. The FBI was there because credit card poo poo is apparently across state lines and such.

The girl got fired and I'm not exactly sure what happened to her after that - I saw her at school once and she apologized, but even though it was a small school our paths didn't really collide beyond that, and I didn't really care to ask for more. I ended up getting 8 hours pay for the whole ordeal along with a 25 cent raise because my boss felt bad about the whole thing. I quit later that summer when I moved away for college.

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Alkydere
Jun 7, 2010
Capitol: A building or complex of buildings in which any legislature meets.
Capital: A city designated as a legislative seat by the government or some other authority, often the city in which the government is located; otherwise the most important city within a country or a subdivision of it.



Midjack posted:

Never underestimate the appeal of retail meat theft.

Speaking Meat Theft back when I worked in a health food kitchen we had this one manager who'd fill in sometimes. Health food chain had 2 kitchens in town that made pre-made meals for shops all around town. Guy was the manager for the other, original kitchen downtown but would cover the occasional shift for our kitchen's managers. None of the Spanish speaking staff liked him since most had worked beneath him before they came to this kitchen and the dude outright played favorites, but I (dumbass white guy fresh from getting a "congratulations: you graduated with 3 minors!" degree) mainly found him frosty. Never had any real issues with him besides him being stuck up, at least compared to the brilliant manager I later had there who shall forever be FUCKWIT McGEE.

Anyways, it eventually turned out the guy had been stealing meat for years. As in order $1-2,000 extra in ground beef, mark it as spoiled on delivery and claim he threw it out as he then sell it super cheap to local area food trucks. Something like half of the kitchen staff, mainly his favorites, quit within a week of him being fired as they were almost certainly in on it and shifting the cheap meat to their family's food trucks.

RoboRodent
Sep 19, 2012

I recall at the grocery store some anti-theft seminar that everyone had to watch when they installed a new security system. It identified high-theft items like meat and cheese, and revealed that people will sell these (relatively) big ticket items on Facebook marketplace.

And all I could think, then and now, was that I cannot imagine buying steak from some total stranger on Facebook. That sounds like an astoundingly unsafe thing to do.

Fil5000
Jun 23, 2003

HOLD ON GUYS I'M POSTING ABOUT INTERNET ROBOTS

RoboRodent posted:

I recall at the grocery store some anti-theft seminar that everyone had to watch when they installed a new security system. It identified high-theft items like meat and cheese, and revealed that people will sell these (relatively) big ticket items on Facebook marketplace.

And all I could think, then and now, was that I cannot imagine buying steak from some total stranger on Facebook. That sounds like an astoundingly unsafe thing to do.

I don't know if it's still common, but here in the UK if you went to the wrong sort of pub you'd get people trying to sell you all sorts of things; meat and bed linen are just two of the things I can recall being offered.

Inner Light
Jan 2, 2020



shortspecialbus posted:

I thought I'd posted this story but I hadn't. This was another one from the gas station back in the late 90's, I would have been 18 for this. [fake edit: apologies, no time to edit this run-on mess]

I worked at a gas station in a small town in Wisconsin after following one of my managers over from the grocery store during the Great Exodus after corporate bought it and ruined what was a great grocery store. There wasn't a lot to the job, so I was pretty good at it after a few weeks and started closing on my own and everything. I also ended up being asked to train a new employee, who was a girl that was in my class but that I didn't know super well.

By and large, she was a decent person, and she picked up most stuff quickly, but her math was atrocious and she could never ever get the balance sheets to match up for drawer count and credit cards and everything. Initially it was obvious math mistakes and it was easy to help her fix it, but after a couple weeks it started getting worse. A couple days in particular I couldn't reconcile it at all, but it was in a super weird way, like the numbers that couldn't be fudged (they came directly out of the register, it wasn't a drawer-count issue) didn't add up right. I mentioned it to the supervisor and she couldn't figure out what was going on either. I couldn't close every night, so they ended up signing her off for closing anyways with the idea that they'd fix it in the mornings.

About 3-4 days later, I get a call from the local police department asking me to come in. They wouldn't say what it was for, but said it was related to the gas station, and said they just had some questions for me. I called my boss at the gas station and asked her what the gently caress, and she said she had no idea either, only that a bunch of police came by the station and seized a bunch of paperwork and told her not to talk to anyone.

Wondering what the gently caress, I went to the police station, and they took me into an interview room. There were I think 2 local cops that I knew, and then some other guy in a suit that I didn't recognize. They started asking me questions about the closing process, and how the balance sheets were done, etc. Then they asked me about the girl I trained, and how that went, and so forth. They then brought out a couple of the balance sheets as like some sort of "GOTCHA!" trump card and asked if that was my handwriting along with hers on it, expecting me to crack about something I guess.

I didn't crack, of course, because it was my writing and I told them so, as well as why my writing was on it. They were still being super cagey, but one went to call the boss to verify my story, and she of course did. They finally decided I really had no idea what the gently caress they were going on about, and explained what was going on.

It turned out the guy I didn't know was some dude from the FBI. Apparently, the girl I'd been training was using credit card numbers/expirations that she would get out of the register's internal paper tape (this was late 90's, that's how it worked on these) to buy lottery tickets for herself. The system wasn't really supposed to allow this, since you can't legally buy lottery tickets with anything besides cash, or couldn't at the time at least. She ended up doing it in some buggy way that the sale would like half-process, and the lottery system was satisfied, but it didn't log it right. This was how the numbers that couldn't be fudged were fudged, basically she managed to stumble on some register bug. She apparently did this when I was cleaning a bathroom or dipping tanks or whatever. Because my handwriting was all over the balance sheets when I was trying to figure out how to reconcile it, they thought I was in on it and that they'd broken up some sort of high school credit card theft ring. My manager was LIVID that they hadn't gone to her first in any meaningful way other than asking her for a shift calendar. I was pissed because the police had also made me give a handwriting sample (useless, since they made me do cursive, which I never used even then) and take fingerprints and I was too intimidated to tell them to gently caress off or ask for a lawyer, plus the whole interrogation thing. The FBI was there because credit card poo poo is apparently across state lines and such.

The girl got fired and I'm not exactly sure what happened to her after that - I saw her at school once and she apologized, but even though it was a small school our paths didn't really collide beyond that, and I didn't really care to ask for more. I ended up getting 8 hours pay for the whole ordeal along with a 25 cent raise because my boss felt bad about the whole thing. I quit later that summer when I moved away for college.

I know the urge to not look guilty is strong, and you were just a kid, but we need to teach people not to talk to the police without a lawyer. So many opportunities to incriminate yourself even without being guilty.

ssb
Feb 16, 2006

WOULD YOU ACCOMPANY ME ON A BRISK WALK? I WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK WITH YOU!!


Inner Light posted:

I know the urge to not look guilty is strong, and you were just a kid, but we need to teach people not to talk to the police without a lawyer. So many opportunities to incriminate yourself even without being guilty.

No kidding. I was technically 18 at the time, but still. I didn't even really know what was going on until the end, and they did say up front that I wasn't under investigation for anything, but I'm pretty loving sure I was.

LonsomeSon
Nov 22, 2009

A fishperson in an intimidating hat!

Inner Light posted:

For example I want to hear about this, was this guy prosecuted / charges pushed or just fired?

To my knowledge they just fired him, I heard from someone else that he had been hired on as an assistant manager at a big-box store there next year, mainly because a GM from our Papa John’s district who had been fired shortly before him (for dealing drugs via pizza delivery, he was probably the single best manager I’ve ever had) had become the GM of it and the drivers who used to sell for him were going to work there.

Cowslips Warren
Oct 29, 2005

What use had they for tricks and cunning, living in the enemy's warren and paying his price?

Grimey Drawer

Inner Light posted:

I know the urge to not look guilty is strong, and you were just a kid, but we need to teach people not to talk to the police without a lawyer. So many opportunities to incriminate yourself even without being guilty.

As kids we are trained to trust the police and just try and be helpful because they're clearly busy and have a lot of stuff to do and they just want to ask us a few questions.

Thankfully I have since learned, through the forums and better call Saul, to just repeat that I want a lawyer and not say anything else.

Elephanthead
Sep 11, 2008


Toilet Rascal
Wait it isn’t common practice to trade what your store sells , beer, with the pizza place next door for pizzas? They are thirsty we are hungry. Efficient market.

Preechr
May 19, 2009

Proud member of the Pony-Brony Alliance for Obama as President

Elephanthead posted:

Wait it isn’t common practice to trade what your store sells , beer, with the pizza place next door for pizzas? They are thirsty we are hungry. Efficient market.

That is common practice. What is not common practice is “give me, personally, a free haircut, and I will give your store hundreds of dollars of discounts in products.”
That whole series of deals amounted to a bunch of favors for that one manager at the expense of the company and particularly in the load of bullshit his hapless subordinates (who did not benefit from any of these arrangements) had to put up with in return.

Cowslips Warren
Oct 29, 2005

What use had they for tricks and cunning, living in the enemy's warren and paying his price?

Grimey Drawer
Okay store trade: When I worked at McDonald's, the manager organized a trade with the manager of the Papa John's in our shopping plaza. We got 3 or 4 large pizzas, they each got a value meal with pie or extra fries.

Bad store trade: manager of copy store tells pizza shop they can have 500 business cards, full color, double side, for $10. In exchange he got a free pizza. I got screamed at by the manager of the pizza shop for not honoring a deal I had no idea he had made. To this day I refuse to get pizza from that chain, because gently caress that bitch.

RoeCocoa
Oct 23, 2010

RoboRodent posted:

And all I could think, then and now, was that I cannot imagine buying steak from some total stranger on Facebook. That sounds like an astoundingly unsafe thing to do.

In the summer of 2019, somebody offered to sell me beef out of an unmarked work truck in a Grocery Outlet parking lot. I feel better about it if I pretend to be 100% sure that he was speaking literally.

Duckman2008
Jan 6, 2010

TFW you see Flyers goaltending.
Grimey Drawer
Oh man, theft stuff. I have a good one.


Anyone here who sees my posts knows that I’ve worked in phones for like, 12 years (and that my posts are bad). Anyway, my one boss was really good, so he got promoted from managing the smaller store I was at to a bigger one.

He gets there , and like less than a week in realizes there’s a big loving problem. Inventory is insanely wrong , employees act weird and they have a crazy amount of sales deactivations every month.

So in phone world, there are large issues with people committing fraud. People steal someone’s identify (they get name, social, address, etc from wherever online), they make fake IDs, and they go store to store pretending to be someone they aren’t. Their goal is buy as many phones as possible, leave the bill on said customers credit, sell phones over seas. There are people that literally go , store to store to store, and this is what they do (as well as call over the phone, go online, etc). They’ll also recruit and pay people to go into stores and do this for them.

So it’s been a massive issue for years, and all carriers legit train a lot on it , because end of the day, if someone has their poo poo stolen, they call, naturally dispute it, and the phone company has to eat that $1,000ish a phone.


Anyway, anyone in phones figures this out within a month, because you absolutely will see it quick. So back to the story, the sales people, inventory , and one assistant manager, they decided that you know what, why not make friends with some of these people ? Literally started taking kickbacks, fraud person would send a person in, ask for whatever person, said person would sell our 4-5 new phones no questions asked, done.

This went on apparently for like, 8-10 months. Sell phones, inventory person would just mark them there at each count, and the old manager quite frankly was lazy and never sat in on inventory counts.

How they got caught: well, appearance wise their phone adds were through the roof, so the old manager got promoted to a bigger store , and my manager got promoted to replace her. Whoops.

I never got the official number, I just know it was easily in 6 figures worth of damage, and 3-4 of them got walked out in handcuffs. I got recruited to go over and replace them, and it was like, months of re building everything. You can imagine these people also were not honest with customers, so it was months of customers coming in going “they said I could just bill this $300 speaker to my account and it would then be free on the bill.” I was always like, “yeah I believe you, let me get a manager.”


Anyway, don’t do massive fraud people.

JackSplater
Nov 20, 2014

Metal Coat? It's already active?!

Duckman2008 posted:

Anyway, don’t do massive fraud people.

Can't help but feel this kind of thing would be way less attractive if the company paid its employees well in the first place.

Sankis
Mar 8, 2004

But I remember the fella who told me. Big lad. Arms as thick as oak trees, a stunning collection of scars, nice eye patch. A REAL therapist he was. Er wait. Maybe it was rapist?


edit: nevermind

Sankis fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Jan 8, 2022

Eric the Mauve
May 8, 2012

Making you happy for a buck since 199X

JackSplater posted:

Can't help but feel this kind of thing would be way less attractive if the company paid its employees well in the first place.

lovely retail wages are definitely a problem and an outrage, but this particular kind of thing is only attractive to idiots. You will inevitably be caught, and not just fired but arrested and sent to prison for a while. Clocking in and out and never actually working is one thing, systematically defrauding six figures from one of the largest and most outlandishly greedy companies on earth is a whole new level of major league stupid.

RoboRodent
Sep 19, 2012

Re: phone fraud

When I got my last phone, I was going over options with the clerk, and this older lady, with her adult daughter, come in. And she was wound up enough that I kept an ear on the conversation while I was there because she was not yet going to the point of personal abuse, she was occasionally skirting close to it that I wanted to be able to interrupt and/or provide a witness if she got over that line because we know the employees can't.

She had purchased several phones. A week later, her account got flagged for fraud and everything got frozen. So here she was, in the store, yelling at an employee to fix it. Unflagging an account for fraud is definitely not something a random employee in a mobile store can do instantly, so he's on the phone with corporate trying to sort it out and it's taking A WHILE. So she decides she just wants to return all the phones and close her account. Except she doesn't have receipts or boxes for any of these phones. Dude is trying his best to figure out a solution, managed to get a refund on one phone but is having trouble finding record of her buying these other phones, and you can't give a refund without that. Her daughter (about my age, fortyish) leaves and comes back several times, weakly requesting her mom give it up. She is ignored. They were still working on it when I left the store with my purchase.

So a week later I had to go back in (my screen protector had fallen off, which the guy warned me that he thought that there might've been a batch problem with that brand, but that was all they had for my phone at the time so just come in and we'll figure it out), and i was the only customer in there that time, and the guy who'd helped me mentioned this freaking lady, and the other employees went OH MY GOD YOU WERE THERE and I got more of the story:

So this lady had decided this was all the fault of the guy who had initially helped her when she'd bought a phone a week previously, accusing him, personally, of somehow flagging her for fraud during the purchase either out of incompetence or maliciousness, despite it being an absolutely ordinary and unremarkable transaction. The day we'd both in there she eventually gave up, screamed at everyone, and abandoned a whole armful of phones at the store, some of which they found record of her buying and could refund, and some which they couldn't. After she had left, they managed to discover that at least one of these phones wasn't even for this carrier, and as such, they had no power to cancel it so she was definitely still going to be responsible for that phone bill.

Can you commit phone fraud through ignorance? Is that what she did? There was definitely more to that story but I never got to hear the rest of it.

Duckman2008
Jan 6, 2010

TFW you see Flyers goaltending.
Grimey Drawer

JackSplater posted:

Can't help but feel this kind of thing would be way less attractive if the company paid its employees well in the first place.

Corp stores actually did pay employees well at this time. Like, it ranged , but both the Blue and Red company paid $40-80k depending on how good you were at sales. And as Erik mentioned above, it’s not smart to risk being arrested by stealing poo poo like that. So, for real the answer is the people doing fraud were morons.

Both companies have def cut back on the high end of that in retail in the past 2 years unfortunately , although for retail it still pays decently.

RoboRodent posted:

Can you commit phone fraud through ignorance? Is that what she did? There was definitely more to that story but I never got to hear the rest of it.


This is a weird one, but reeks of social engineering IMO. Also, people can do a lot of poo poo via just ignorance.

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

JackSplater posted:

Can't help but feel this kind of thing would be way less attractive if the company paid its employees well in the first place.

Thing is, nine times out of ten, the people with the access to do these large fraud things and who do them are the already well-paid managers, in my limited experience.

You'll get the occasional 50,000-dollar theft for someone to pay their gambling debts or whatever, but most floor-employee people who do this end up doing it to pay for acute needs and emergencies, not cost of living stuff. So I think it's less to do with basic needs (though yes employees being paid a fair and livable wage is good) but more to do with the fact that most people stealing are just greedy pricks(hence why they're managers).

Enos Shenk
Nov 3, 2011


D34THROW posted:

On the theft front, there was the day i came in for an opening shift at Dollar Tree and found out the store had been broken into. They went into the roof over the office, came down on the safe pretty much and cut a hole in it to steal maybe $1.5k in cash and coin. Then they cut a hole in our stockroom wall to the Tuesday Morning next door, boosted their entire SAFE out of TMs back door.

My store had a Dollar Tree right next door that got broken into too. What's with this mission impossible poo poo to get into Dollar Tree? On ours they pickaxed the rear emergency door open, luckily for them the door was made of 10% steel 90% rust. Then pickaxed the safe open, apparently Dollar Tree safes just have sheet metal sides. They peeled it like a bannana and got some rolled coin.



That's our emergency door next to it, they tried ours but didn't quite get it open. It was bent enough to get us a new door though. We were in at 6am that morning for truck, then wandered out on our break after unload to find cops all over the parking lot. We were a bit confused.

ErKeL
Jun 18, 2013
I'm no thief but if I were I feel like hitting the dollar tree store wouldn't cross my mind. That just sounds like all risk and literally no reward? What's the point?
Or do they secretly make bank and keep it stored on site?

Fil5000
Jun 23, 2003

HOLD ON GUYS I'M POSTING ABOUT INTERNET ROBOTS

ErKeL posted:

I'm no thief but if I were I feel like hitting the dollar tree store wouldn't cross my mind. That just sounds like all risk and literally no reward? What's the point?
Or do they secretly make bank and keep it stored on site?

I reckon you look for the easiest poo poo to steal rather than the most. Who's going to have poo poo security? A store who's every product costs a buck. You might not get away with a lot of cash but you WILL get away.

Eric the Mauve
May 8, 2012

Making you happy for a buck since 199X
Word no doubt gets out from people who work or have worked at dollar stores that there's no meaningful security there. Even with some of the stories in this thread and elsewhere, it strikes you that whoever broke in evidently knew where the safe was.

Fil5000
Jun 23, 2003

HOLD ON GUYS I'M POSTING ABOUT INTERNET ROBOTS
It's just the same logic that thieves use when going for detergent pods or baby formula - what's the highest value I can get away with for the least risk.

Cowslips Warren
Oct 29, 2005

What use had they for tricks and cunning, living in the enemy's warren and paying his price?

Grimey Drawer
Many years ago I worked at a small zoo where it was cash or check only. Seriously, they just got credit card machines like 10 years ago. Anyway everything was cash, but some idiot decided to

1, rob one of the rides that cost $2 to ride

2, steal the cashbox and run

3, forget he was an overweight man who couldn't run (by this point people were after him)

4, get toward the exit, panic, throw the cashbox in some bushes, and run outside the entry gates

5, huff it back inside the zoo, after running through the parking lot, by climbing a fence and falling back inside

6, get cornered by a zookeeper behind the penguin house, so he reeked of fish and poo poo

7, get hauled up to the entrance where the cops were waiting.


By step 4, someone had found the box and returned it to the gift shop. The cops were amused he did all this poo poo for about.... $40.

His wife and MIL, who had no idea where he had gone after leaving them near the tigers, were less amused.

Cowslips Warren fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Jan 9, 2022

Aniodia
Feb 23, 2016

Literally who?


Update: there was also "THUG 4 LIFE" written in the employee locker room, also allegedly written by the genius

either way though, dude got shitcanned

lol get hosed

sorry not sorry

Cowslips Warren
Oct 29, 2005

What use had they for tricks and cunning, living in the enemy's warren and paying his price?

Grimey Drawer
Found out today that the owner of a place I used to work at, a place where he personally cut my hours many times, refused to offer me insurance or any kind of benefits even after I was injured at the job, has died of cancer.

I should feel bad about it, but the dude was old, he leaves behind a family and a pretty good legacy where most of the world doesn't know what a scrooge he really was, and all I can think is, after all the years he had of cutting people's hours, or not giving raises, or doing everything in his power for tax loopholes for himself, after decades of this, he didn't get to take it all with him. That was probably the biggest surprise of his life. Or death whichever.

Takoluka
Jun 26, 2009

Don't look at me!



Cowslips Warren posted:

I should feel bad about it

No you shouldn't.

Neito
Feb 18, 2009

😌Finally, an avatar the describes my love of tech❤️‍💻, my love of anime💖🎎, and why I'll never see a real girl 🙆‍♀️naked😭.

RoboRodent posted:

I recall at the grocery store some anti-theft seminar that everyone had to watch when they installed a new security system. It identified high-theft items like meat and cheese, and revealed that people will sell these (relatively) big ticket items on Facebook marketplace.

And all I could think, then and now, was that I cannot imagine buying steak from some total stranger on Facebook. That sounds like an astoundingly unsafe thing to do.

The Broken Fridge Truck Meat Scam is still one of the most popular cons to pull and it's been a well known thing for something like fifty or sixty years.

Thomamelas
Mar 11, 2009

ErKeL posted:

I'm no thief but if I were I feel like hitting the dollar tree store wouldn't cross my mind. That just sounds like all risk and literally no reward? What's the point?
Or do they secretly make bank and keep it stored on site?

Most break ins just don't get you very much. Robbing a bank averages $5000 but draws FBI attention. Home break-ins tend to be around $2800 but that's cop math and tends to ignore that haggling on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist is gonna push that amount down. I have no idea what the comparable amounts for a retail break-ins would be. The numbers for theft around retail at the moment have been politicized and given the radical jump, I don't buy them. But given how stores do cash drops, I doubt it's super high.

This was after my time in retail, but I was working with an LP department for a pharmacy store. And they were having an issue with people breaking in and stealing the ATMs. The thieves hadn't been successful because they were in Manhattan and ATMs are heavy. So getting in via smashing the windows wasn't hard. But trying to get the ATMs away on foot hadn't worked well. And they ended up being abandoned within a few dozen yards of the store. But they didn't seem to stop. So they set up a stakeout using the cameras to watch all of the locations at night.

And the night the LP people were watching, the thieves tried something new. And they brought a truck. It took them so long to get the ATM into the truck that the cops surprised them. So that didn't work well.

D34THROW
Jan 29, 2012

RETAIL RETAIL LISTEN TO ME BITCH ABOUT RETAIL
:rant:

ErKeL posted:

I'm no thief but if I were I feel like hitting the dollar tree store wouldn't cross my mind. That just sounds like all risk and literally no reward? What's the point?
Or do they secretly make bank and keep it stored on site?

Usually there was less than a grand in the safe, including the four tills that had $75 each in them overnight. I'm assuming that they figured it would be a cheap safe (1/4" steel, maybe 3/16", thin as gently caress) and that they were hitting the Tuesday Morning as well anyway.


EDIT: Aaaand I was just reminded of a particular branch of our clientele, which included the hobos from the homeless camp behind the plaza. They all stank like BO and booze when they came in after begging. One bought multiple bottles of the Assured-brand amber mouthwash (not even the good minty poo poo) at a time and 95% was drinking them as a cheap blinding booze. Another bought two orange sodas and a Slim Jim or some cheap food item, but when you'd ask him how he was doing, Steve would always reply, "Woke up on the right side of the dirt, brother!" with a huge smile on his face. Somehow an :unsmith: moment from a very :smith: situation.

D34THROW fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Jan 11, 2022

Konstantin
Jun 20, 2005
And the Lord said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.
If you're a thief that wants the big money, hit up gaming stores. I used to be into Magic the Gathering, and the average store can easily have tens of thousands of dollars of untraceable cards that can be easily flipped. I've been to tournaments with hundreds of people each carrying decks and trade binders worth thousands, and no security beyond a few cheap cameras. It's absolutely insane and I'm surprised there aren't more large scale robberies.

The Lord Bude
May 23, 2007

ASK ME ABOUT MY SHITTY, BOUGIE INTERIOR DECORATING ADVICE
I would imagine the sort of people who decide to throw on a balaclava and rob a grocery store aren't willing or able to spend the time researching the values of different mtg cards and going to the trouble of disposing of them.

Eric the Mauve
May 8, 2012

Making you happy for a buck since 199X
Yeah in the vast majority of small time burglaries/robberies the criminal in question is suffering from withdrawal and trying to get either cash or relatively light items he can very quickly fence for cash, so as to pay for his next fix of heroin/meth/whatever.

I'm not into MTG myself and haven't actually been in a game store in years, but my recollection is I only ever saw MTG starter/sample decks out on counters/shelves and the real stuff was locked behind the counter. Game-store goons, is this not the case in your experience?

Eric the Mauve fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Jan 12, 2022

Star Man
Jun 1, 2008

There's a star maaaaaan
Over the rainbow
Someone breaking into a game store to steal Magic and Polémon singles out of the case already knows what they're getting into.

The thing to do is to be at a big event and just steal someone's backpack and sell whatever's inside. The vendors aren't going to ask where any of it came from. It's why it's recommended to only take what you need at those things and leave whatever you don't plan on selling or trading at your hotel or at home. I think you can get that stuff covered under insurance too.

Sankis
Mar 8, 2004

But I remember the fella who told me. Big lad. Arms as thick as oak trees, a stunning collection of scars, nice eye patch. A REAL therapist he was. Er wait. Maybe it was rapist?


Konstantin posted:

If you're a thief that wants the big money, hit up gaming stores. I used to be into Magic the Gathering, and the average store can easily have tens of thousands of dollars of untraceable cards that can be easily flipped. I've been to tournaments with hundreds of people each carrying decks and trade binders worth thousands, and no security beyond a few cheap cameras. It's absolutely insane and I'm surprised there aren't more large scale robberies.

Someone recently went into some mtg shop that had one of those $50k cards, asked to see it, they let him (!), and he just ran out lmao

its probably entirely unsellable though. it has a unique set of signatures

LonsomeSon
Nov 22, 2009

A fishperson in an intimidating hat!

ErKeL posted:

I'm no thief but if I were I feel like hitting the dollar tree store wouldn't cross my mind. That just sounds like all risk and literally no reward? What's the point?
Or do they secretly make bank and keep it stored on site?

It sounds to me like someone involved was in the know about the non-pickaxe-proof sheet metal safes. You could do something like that solo and still come away with some cash, even if it’s bulky. Depending on how fast it is you could do several stores in a night.

Getting into a place and not having the tools to break into the overnight safe seems like the second-worst case to me, after getting caught.

Rainbow Knight
Apr 19, 2006

We die.
We pray.
To live.
We serve

i'm writing all these ideas down

Vice President
Jul 4, 2007

I'm number two around here.

Is anyone in here a cop? If you're a cop you have to tell us, it's the law

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Lord Awkward
Feb 16, 2012
Retail Thread: Burglary Q&A

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