On the February 9th, the following news story was released. What it shows was in a shop a trusted employee whom the owners considered part of the family stole at least $36,000 from them. If you have not yet seen it, well I think it's worth a view.
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/02/09/19/48/queensland-newsagency…
What she did is use her insider’s knowledge of shop security measures and the software the shop was using to steal stock and take money out of the till. What was the cause of her undoing was some stock was discovered suspiciously missing. Then doing an investigation it was shown that at least $36,000 had gone missing from the till. How much did she take is unclear?
Although these people were not our client and the system was not ours, we are currently putting together specifications for changes to our system that will make such fraud much harder.
The problem here is in his scenario many have stated is that the common methods for dealing with employee shop lifting do not work.
Enforce scanning of everything does not work because the shop is small so often the employee is alone and can make any policy she wants.
As she knows how to bypass security on the cash register, there are no suspicious cancelled, deleted sales or items deleted from sales. The tills always balance so even if you suddenly do an unexpected spot check, it will not show it up. Even if it did show up since the shift loss is small often here about $20, even if found it would not cause any alarms.
The bank balances are consistent as she is supplying the figures.
Although in this case, the cameras were important, it should be noted that she knows where the video camera layouts. Interestingly once the owners were alerted to a possible problem here, they studied the camera footage and that was what got her. I discussed this with a client of mine last Wednesday, Gerard from Sorrento news, and he told me, that once he was suspicious he just sat and watched someone for over 20 minutes before he found it. You have to sit and watch he said.
The immediate solution that we are recommending to our clients is to change your passwords, who know who knows them. Then change your camera layouts. Now review your security measures. If you have any problems and need to discuss it, our clients can always ring us.
Furthermore, in the next few weeks we will be rolling out updates specially designed to combat this type of fraud, which will make it harder.
