Many retailers might think that cameras are enough of a deterrent to prevent employees from stealing, but the reality is far from it. Criminals can be crafty and find unassuming ways to exploit your POS system to give them a bigger (and illegal) payday.
Thankfully, if employees are repeatedly stealing, there will be a very distinct trail of breadcrumbs that exists within your POS system. So, how do retailers easily look for and capture these trails that exist within the POS? TRUNO’s TruView can spot these prominent patterns that criminals leave behind within just two or three mouse clicks. TruView is a business intelligence application that gives retailers of almost any size insight into when and why things are selling.
Employee theft is an age-old problem that unfortunately affects almost every retailer at some point during the lifetime of their business, whether they know it or not. While there are dozens of specific ways that employees may steal, I have grouped them into five main categories of schemes that retailers should look out for.
Five Ways Employees Commit Fraud:
Faking a Transaction – This is most common with cash transactions. Employees may ring everything up correctly and normally, especially if there is a camera pointed at them, but then somehow suspend or void the transaction, pocketing the cash, allowing the store to both lose inventory and have the cash balance correctly at the end of the day.
Ringing up Fake Coupons – There is no such thing as a BOGO coupon on a brand-new PlayStation 5 or Wagyu prime rib. Some employees may try to input fraudulent coupons into the POS to steal either cash or items. This can be hard for retailers to spot as the cash will still balance at the end of the day.
Fraudulent Returns - There are numerous ways that employee theft can occur with return transactions. For example, an employee may lie and “purchase” something with cash and then “return” it to their own debit card. This again can be very tough for retailers to spot without a business intelligence application. While this can be easily spotted in TruView, Stores can also help prevent any fraudulent returns by implementing a customizable and reliable returns system.
Open Department Ring – An open department ring is when a cashier rings items up to a specific department in the store, not an item/UPC, and then they credit cash without ever specifying what the item or items were. This can be a perfectly normal and legitimate transaction but can also be abused by criminals to commit fraud.
No Sale Theft – This occurs when employees simply open the cash drawer and steal money. While this method of stealing is much easier to catch employees committing, it still requires an attentive manager to investigate why employees opened the cash drawer when they did. With some stores choosing to balance their cash every 2-3 days, trying to investigate potential theft from days ago can be incredibly difficult.
TruView gives users the ability to easily view the breadcrumbs each of these schemes leaves behind in the POS with a simple search of transaction data by employee. See a cashier who voided a cash transaction? Not very suspicious by itself, but with another mouse click users can see how many times they have voided cash transactions in the past. If it looks like a frequent occurrence, then this could very likely be an employee committing fraud.
The same goes for an employee who seems to be ringing up a suspicious number of coupons, frequently doing an open department ring, opening a cash drawer for little to no reason, or completing returns going to debit cards with the same last four digits.
All this data can be accessed in TruView within a matter of seconds, and while situations like these are often fraud, they can also just be an employee who has been improperly trained or misunderstood something. Regardless, if it looks suspicious, it’s worth investigating.
It is also worth mentioning that TruView is not a “cure-all” solution when it comes to preventing and eliminating theft from employees. Think of it like an X-ray machine into the data stored inside your POS. It is merely a tool to help find an existing problem. Once you have found the problem, you will need to contact the police and potentially update your operations, lock down registers more, update policies and procedures, and educate employees to try to prevent it from happening again.
Some retailers who were initially skeptical that any of their employees would be stealing a significant amount of money have implemented TruView and immediately discovered evidence of employees stealing tens of thousands of dollars, enough to pay for TruView for decades. In short, we don’t know what we don’t know, and the first step to unlocking insight into fraud that may be occurring in your store lies within your POS.
