...Woman Buys Computer, Other Electronics for $3.70 at Walmart After Allegedly Swapping Barcodes

KTLA ^ | 111/08/2017

[Dilbert San Diego]

That’s something I wondered about the self checkouts. If there’s no employee checking people out, how can you be sure people scan all their items to pay?

I don’t like self checkout, perhaps showing my bias. But I have a feeling that, for whatever savings stores have in labor costs, is offset by increasing theft.

[central_va]

Get rid of self service. It sucks and is ripe with fraud. We end up paying for it anyway Any savings realized by not hiring a checkout person that can detect fraud is offset by the shopliftig losses. Lose-lose.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Ilike Coach purses.

I buy them used on Ebay for twenty bucks.

[rightwingintelligentsia]

They’re really quite easy to find and very inexpensive on the secondary market.

I bought four of them at a yard sale for a total of $35 a few years ago. I know they’re genuine, as one of them had the original receipt from the Coach store in it.

I never did understand why people pay hundreds and thousands for purses. I guess it’s a status thing.

[mbynack]

I don’t try clothes on in the stores so do return stuff every now and then. At some stores they take the high priced stuff and do a check on the tag to see if it matches with the merchandise. I asked why they did it and they said that people switch tags. It would never occur to me to do something like that and there needs to be a punishment for someone who does that, intentionally stealing from the store. And a ‘don’t do that again’ is not enough. This attitude is what has emboldened the moral decay in our society

I can't tell you how many times we were cleaning up the shoe department and found someone's old sneakers in a shoe box. They come in and put on the new shoes and stuff their old ones in the box and leave the store.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

I buy everything except, shoes, socks and underwear used.

I even got a used cat. :)

People will sell me things with tags still on them for pennies on the dollar.

[Oatka]

[CardCarryingMember.VastRightWC]

Often when I hear how incredibly creative a thief or swindler can be, I have to ask myself: "Why not put that God-given creativity to legitimate use, to make a ton of money in a way they can brag of, instead of going to prison for it?"

The following is only somewhat related to the topic at hand, but still a great story to share ....

In the early/mid 90s, colleagues of mine who worked at the Hewlett Packard plant in Grenoble France had a fascinating tale to tell of the rise & fall of an illicit enterprise going on right under their noses for months, if not years.

Back then, cable TV signals were all analog. The scrambling method was of course kept secret, but was easy to crack for any competent RF engineer. It turned out the French cable company just added a certain repeating wave form (ie a sine wave of a certain amplitude & frequency) to cable signals, so that if you hooked your TV directly up to the cable coming from your wall, you got garbage static on the TV.

Paying the Cable Co for service meant they applied a descrambling signal to what came out of your wall, that merely subtracted that sine wave from the signal, so that you were left with the original signal from the TV studios.

An HP engineer who designed circuit boards figured out how to make one for himself that unscrambled the signal, allowing him to get free cable TV service.

He decided this would be a great little money-making enterprise for himself, but the costs in materials & labor to churn these out was about the same as what he could expect to sell them for on the black market. So he would just break even or worse.

He needed a cheap way to mass produce them. And he found it.

At the time, there were a number of circuit boards that HP built at that site, which were placed into the chasses of certain pieces of electronic equipment that HP-Grenoble sold. These boards usually came out of the board-fabricating machine as rectangles, but due to size/shape restraints of the chassis they needed to fit into, the boards would have large rectangular chunks cut out of them in some corner or other.

The Circuit Board designers of course had to arrange all the components to fit on the remainder of the board. The chunks cut out of corners or sides were unused by the circuit. These "waste" areas of the board were thrown out after being cut away.

Since this engineer was one of the designers, he secretly changed the design for one of the boards to have a second circuit - the cable TV descrambling circuit - imprinted on the board onto the unused corner, complete with a set of tabs at the board's edge to connect input/output and power to the circuit.

Then he co-opted the two employees who handled the corner-cuts and the disposal of the board waste, by bribing them to save all the corners from the waste bin and pass them to him instead. He then assembled each tiny piece of circuit board into a small chassis containing a battery and two coax connectors, and sold them on the black market.

His downfall eventually came when one of the two bribed employees was transferred to another job at the same plant. The engineer managed to co-opt her replacement, and shifted all the money he was paying her to her replacement. She got mad at this.

From her point of view, the payments to her covered both the act of saving & passing on the waste pieces, plus Hush Money, and thus they should continue to flow into her pocketbook at the same rate as before, regardless of where in the plant she worked.

From the engineer's point of view, the bribe money was mainly or entirely for saving & passing on the board corners. He refused to meet the price she demanded, and so she ratted on him.

I don't know whether she worked out some sort of a "turn state's evidence" deal with their bosses that protected her from her past malfeasance. Or whether she basically cut off her nose to spite her face and lost her job too. But it was a pretty darned fascinating story that left you trying hard to balance admiration for a crook's brilliant creativity against the sin of his crime.