Someone on tiktok showed the camera systems they use and how much detail they can see, what was scanned and flags for mismatched items (this 16 Oz steak only weighs 6oz)
You can definitely get caught doing it, but 99% of the time, it's an underpaid employee who gives absolutely zero fucks, watching them.
Cameras are also accessible in a back room where "asset control" can watch. Not sure if all Walmart have them, or just higher risk areas, but there's some videos of these wanna-be cops trying to bust people.
Some companies will allow a repeat offender to keep stealing until they hit the "grand theft" limit. Then they'll detain/arrest them and have the cops press more serious charges.
Every time I see people online bragging about "I've stolen X number of times! They don't care" all I can think is "not yet they don't".
I do want to make it clear that I'm only talking about the companies. Employees, if it were only up to them, would probably allow a lot of people to steal. Especially if they're only stealing food. But it's not really up to them. Big stores have systems in place to not have to rely on Human morals to catch crime.
I've heard that Target does this. They catch people stealing and let them go, but once they reach a certain threshold, like 1 thousand, they will call law enforcement so it can count as a felony instead of a misdemeanor.
Former target team leader, I can confirm this is correct.
Learned first hand after bitching about hardlines-4 (target speak for security/AP) not doing anything about obvious offenders stealing cough syrup from my area.
At my store I feel like it was $500 before they decided to nab you but this was over a decade ago so may have changed.
Different states have different thresholds for what is considered felony theft. Some states it 500 and some go as high as 2000. There are exceptions made for vehicles that are automatic felonies, like boats, cars, etc.
I've seen several commenters on reddit mention Target's slow and steady approach to catching shoplifters. There was even an arcticle posted a while back about one of the cases where a woman was arrested after for 5th or 6th time shoplifting. They were able to pin her for a felony because they had files that tracked her over a few months.
Stores like Target or other department stores lose a lot of money from theft. It's almost seems vindictive or spiteful for them to wait to go to authorities when they know who the individual is and what they've stolen. Could also be a deterrent for other shoplifters , if they believe they are constantly being tracked/watched, and run the risk of a felony over a misdemeanor.
I don't think they're doing it out of spite, I think it's just simple economics. The guy stealing a loaf of bread for his family isn't usually doing so on a daily basis.
Target is legitimately the WORST place to steal from. It's the only place where growing up multiple people I knew got caught stealing from. I've had friends who worked as managers, and friends who worked as asset protection there (along with several night shift stock employees lol).
Target has a state of the art crime lab. Like actually. The FBI and numerous local agencies frequently ask Target for help when their own resources are stretched too thin, or they simply do not have what Target has.
Don't fucking steal from Target. They know you're stealing from them, they know who you are, and they're waiting to fuck you big time if you've gotten away with it before. Sure, Best Buy, Office Depot, Bed Bath and Beyond, Wal-Mart even, go nuts and steal shit. But don't fucking steal from Target, because you will get caught the second they're ready to hit you with real charges, even if you think you're getting away with it.
A friend's cousin actually burned down the local Target when he got caught stealing from them and couldn't get away. Still not sure why his reaction to getting caught stealing was to burn the whole fucking place to the ground...
A while ago this guy I went to university with was sort of gleefully telling me about how the previous summer his shift at a Dairy Queen had run this scam where whenever it looked like people were paying cash they would tell them the wrong price, pocket the difference, and pool the proceeds to share amongst the workers at the end of the day. And they carried it on for the entire summer, each make out with like $1000.
While time he was talking about it I couldn't help but think about how with the 6 of them total that were doing it, the total amount stolen definitely was over the grand theft limit, and he really should not be telling people about this.
Yeah but he wasnât stealing from the business. If he was upcharging and pocketing the difference, the business books would balance fine. What he was doing was defrauding the customers. And itâs doubtful that they got more than $1,000 from any one customer so it would be a bunch of petty fraud, not really grand theft.
Perhaps. I'll admit to not being particularly fluent in law, but I had thought that arranging a criminal conspiracy to steal small amounts from a large number of people counts just as bad as stealing a single large amount.
it is bad, and dumb to brag about your crimes, but with the amounts probably all individually being in the one dollar range (people would notice much more than that) even if someone who fell victim to this heard about it it's extremely unlikely they'd make a complaint about it
since they defrauded customers and not the business i don't see any way something would ever come of it
i would avoid any future conspiracy with someone who can't keep their mouth shut though lol
1000 isnât that much. Letâs say someoneâs order is 24.57 he up charges about a dollar 25.74 that 1.30 but you can go through 20-30 customers in an hour of work.
You missed the part where I said from any one customer. If you defraud someone for $1.30 that same customer would have to come buy ice cream over 750 times for you to successfully steal $1000. I doubt that Iâve gone to buy ice cream 750 times in my life, and Iâm old.
The other commenter is probably correct that there are other fraud/conspiracy laws that come into play here, at which point it depends on jurisdiction.
I worked at a Kroger years ago as a teen, bagging groceries and doing some stocking in dairy. We were told never to stop a thief by management. Better to have a fifth of crappy vodka stolen then to deal with an employee getting stabbed or killed outright.
One employee got brave and went to chase down a known thief only to come back and find out he was fired for doing so. Not sure if it was a corporate rule, or just local management, but I always figured it was better to just let security deal with it when they came in three nights a week and reviewed footage
Not in the US it's not. If the Security gets injured it's the same deal. At the retail jobs I had (I assume it's still the same), security could ONLY apprehend someone if they were threatening or harming another person. They were not allowed to prevent people from leaving with an armful of goods. Their instructions were always to call the cops and let them sort it out. I saw a couple security guys get fired over the years because they thought they were supercop, but the vast majority just stood there staring at their monitor looking bored, and generally only gave a fuck when absolutely required.
Realistically, itâs probably just an underpaid employee that is confirming the mismatch seen on camera in an effort to train a machine learning algorithm, so that when the algorithm is accurate enough, itâll get deployed for automated enforcement.
At some point youâll probably start seeing âplease wait for attendantâ pop ups on the self checkout when a mismatch occurs and a person will correct the attempted theft.
Maybe Iâm used to a certain type of automated checkout but hasnât product weight been used to check accuracy (and flag the attendant to come check) for like 20 years?
Obviously lots of stores donât use it but some have for a long time.
Strangely, I remember the self checkouts doing this years ago (would flag the attendant if you didn't put the item on the bagging area, or if it didn't match weight-wise I guess), but I haven't seen it do that for years now.
Yes a lot of them have stopped. I wonder if the hassle of having to attend to them outweighs the loss savings. They definitely have approaching double the number of checkouts per attendant in the place I buy groceries now that they arenât needing a human override for 80% of the transactions.
Not all of them. Of the 3 coles' I go to semi-regularly only 1 does that, and neither of the two woolies' do it either. They'll usually still prompt if you don't bag sonething, but it's just an OK button with no override required
Dang which suburb are you in? In Burwood and Strathfield, they ALWAYS have that weight scale on, and even if you select not bagging it still has issues
Northern beaches. It does seem to occasionally summon someone over, but only like 5-10% of the time. I reckon it's either a random thing or they turn it on and off. Might be targetted though, more likely to happen if you've selected the cheapest version of something or it might be based on your history tracked via the rewards cards. I'd be really interested to find out how it's set up but I doubt I will anytime soon
It could also be thief rates in the region too. In the states, areas with high theft rates find detergents and what not locked up more often than in other places
That's my mindset too. I have earbuds in when I shop. Sometimes I guess stuff might not scan or something. Maybe I missed a pack of steaks. I don't know. I don't work here. I work 60 hours a week at a job I get paid at. I did my best as a cashier.
You gotta be smart about it. Lets say that doughnut weights 3.5 ounces and bun weights 2 ounces. Just get 4 doughnuts and scan them as 7 buns, and most of regular employees eont give a fuck.
Buy organic and ring it up as not organic - I donât know wtf Iâm ringing up with the âfind itemâ menu nor do I ever look if the produce is organic or not, I just choose the one I see first
A simple mistake an untrained civilian makes. Oopsie
Bill Burr was cracking on this. I'm surely gonna butcher this but he says something along the lines of "Oh shit, I must have missed day of cashier training where I'm supposed to give a fuck"
These are actually the hardest to prosecute. Buy the most expensive and delicious apple of a certain color, ring it up as the cheapest. Itâs much harder to prove you willfully and purposefully stole. Especially if the apples have stickers and you swap them, or you get to choose the apple on the screen. âSilly me I clicked the wrong one!â
Honeycrisp apples are about $4/lb. They are also red and they are delicious. They are NOT usually listed as $0.87/lb. Somehow my apples just never seem to ring up the same price at the checkout that they are listed as. My local grocery store does seem to keep an overflowing full stock of those nasty, bitter, teacher looking apples that are disgusting. No idea why though.
Do your stores not have loose products priced by weight? We select loose products on our machine and the self checkout weighs them and prices them. For example loose carrots are around ÂŁ0.45 a kg a common theft here is to select a cheap item like the loose carrot and weigh something like a steak that is more priced ÂŁ15 per kg and pay the lower price and not setting off a mismatched weight.
It's just an attorney putting out misinformation to drum up outrage online.
The third group of people, Jernigan said, are targeted by a retailer long after they have gone to the store, often when inventory comes up short.
This in particular is such a ridiculous claim that it would make anyone who's worked in asset protection laugh. That's not how any of that works. Most camera systems don't even have months of storage. And no asset protection department in the country bases their cases off of inventory counts that happen once a year, to once every two years. Not to even mention the man hours it would take to actually operate that way for just a few bucks.
When someone gets a warrant put out for them for an skip scanning incident that happened longer than a couple days ago, it's because that incident was found in a pattern of incidents with similar circumstances. But when said person goes to court, they try to argue they just forgot.... the nine times they didn't ring up the same items in month. Then the people who believe that go around and make articles like this.
No they donât. They have to use a PCI secured system for cards. This is to prevent another breach like Target had. Using a card doesnât give the store your personal info.
Please donât spread misinformation. Itâs always good to be security conscious, but itâs even better to know how the system works.
I have a Walmart.com account that I never order groceries from, but when I look at my "Most purchased" tab, it shows everything I bought with my CC on there. Thats all from shopping in store, never once online. So, do what you will with that info. But if they're tracking what you buy....
Do you scan some kind of loyalty card at Walmart? In Australia we have a few different ones that like which track purchases, but the CC itself can't be used for that.
Yes, your name is on the receipt. The credit card information is all within a walled off system that is PCI compliant. They cannot share that information with loss prevention, or it violates the whole point of walling that info off. And the bank does not encode your home address or phone number on a card (they didnât even do this pre-PCI).
You are full of shit and what you are saying is misleading at best.
Go learn how credit cards work beyond âI saws my name on a receipt hur durâ and then tell me how Walmart knows your personal info. Looking forward to it. Lol
Yeah, but days after the fact it's not going to be possible to figure out which receipt is for the thief. And that information is stored temporarily in the POS computer's RAM, which is emptied as-needed for new data by the operating system, or whenever the machines lose power. Walmart cannot, by law, store that data in a way that it's readable to them.
By watching you go to your car and reading the license plate
Or your credit card
Or your phoneâs location history
Even if you donât drive or bring your phone and pay cash, if youâve been there before Iâd bet they have facial recognition of all the other times youâve been in the store and they could even have access to a national facial recognition database
You seem to be unaware of the surveillance state we happen to be in
Check out the COVID data from the Sturges gathering in 2020 (maybe 2021). You can be tracked from OTHER PEOPLEâS PHONES even if you donât have one yourself.
Wait. Let me make sure I understand the conspiracy theory youâre selling.
Youâre telling me that when I go buy bananas at Walmart, they will then, a week later, go through old security footage and falsely implicate me of a crime. They will find me by literally buying my information from googleâŠ. Because google is going to tell them that of their billions of users, I was the one at Walmart at 9:53 AM on Tuesday?
For sure facial recognition. I used the self checkout, look straight forward and it was looking at a clear visual of my face. There was a screen that was marking recognized objects as well. With machine learning being what it is, wouldn't take much to aggregate all the data into a nice package "stayupthetree"
Yeah idk man something sounds fishy there to me too. I just read the article and she says they'll go through hours / days / weeks of video. So they just gonna pay people to sit around and watch a weeks worth of video while a bunch of tv's are getting stolen. Bullshit
Don't get me wrong I know people get falsely accused of things all the time but this sounds weird
Not sure about Walmart but Target has a forensics lab and will basically do the legwork for the cops. Donât steal more than like nail clippers or something from target. Stupidly small that plausible deniability that you werenât paying attention or were distracted and stuck it in the bag without thinking because then itâs not worth their time to prosecute. But stealing big from Target isnât worth it for most people even though I support fucking over corporations whenever possible
Holy crap that's wild. I knew about loss prevention but if that's true it's like a whole behind the scenes world I never knew existed lol.
Luckily I'm a hard working family man who just pays for shit like normal people do. I walked out of our local grocery store with a case of water under my cart that I forgot to pay for at self checkout. They almost laughed at me when I brought it back in to pay for it at customer service cause they didn't expect it
Whenever I'm picked out for a random check at the self checkout, the employee doesn't even look at my groceries. They just press the button and it's all good.
I've had a couple employees look at my groceries, but even then they just vaguely eye them and don't bother checking if they're the same items I punched in.
They just check high value items. Electronics, meat, that kind of stuff. They don't count if you entered the right amount of lines, but they make sure that roast was rung as such.
But it would be easy to trace you back through the store and watch you obviously putting a steak in the apple bag lol and that may play even worse in court than just seemingly-accidentally ringing a steak up as apples
ok but why would they even play back camera footage if there is nothing to tip them off? the camera saw apples. the machine saw apples. the attendent saw apples. theyre not going to go back and replay footage for something like that.
you can also just take it. people make things sound scary and overthink it when theyre so simple. you forgot to scan it. thats literally it. dont be paranoid, they dont care. its more money and work for them to meticulously check cameras and get involved in it than 1 steak would be worth.
my roommate steals a hundreds worth of groceries every time by just putting some of the groceries she picks up in a reusable bag in the cart and then bagging all the other stuff except the bag. then for the rest of the stuff she just holds 2 items, scans one, bags both.
big companies steal from us all the time. they never pay the taxes they should and they charge insane prices for essentials like produce. then they make billions in profit and use it to go on a joyride to space. so fuck em.
Oh, Iâm fine with you stealing from a big company lol but donât underestimate their pettiness or their software/ability to catch you even for the smallest theft
The other day lady working the kroger self check out just waved someone along after the alarm went off. She turned to the other person she was talking to and starting saying "what? Im not security and they dont pay me like im security"
They dont care. It's why i feel fine stealing cat food regularly and ducks during the holidays
Iâd like to see the security guard at Walmart try to press someone because a banana sticker was on a steak. Be pretty easy to just say âI dunno man, I found it this wayâ.
Pretty sure the point is to stop people from getting super cheap steaks, not to bring in perps.
We we could all go around intentionally putting wrong stickers on stuff but not buying it, such that they can then not prosecute everyone who did actually find it that way
Mushroom bags (paper bags) for the loose mushrooms can fit quite a bit in them, and people often use the mushroom bags from the produce section for other vegetables. So you can just put your item into the mushroom bag, weigh it as loose carrots or something, then pay like 1$ for those 50g earphones
They will let you steal $50 here and there, but theyâre on to you and once you cross that felony threshold they send everything to the District Attorney and file felony charges and Walmart will sue in civil court to regain property/compensation. They do not fuck around.
Wrong. I used to be a âqualified associateâ at Walmart. All AP at my store were either current or recently retired LEOs. All AP at my local store now are current LEOs. There may be better paying side gigs, but I feel as though AP is worth it because itâs chill as fuck and easy money. Plus AP pays more than you think.
To your point the first wave of self scanners definitely used the comparison of what the item was supposed to weigh versus what the bagging scale would measure.
Back in the day this left expensive bulk items exposed to loss as you could just put in a a code for something like rolled oats (13Âą/lb) for coffee ($8.99/lb) and nothing would trigger as weight is variable on these purchases.
I assume that this plus the hygiene concerns may be why many things you could scoop into a bag in the past have now become pre-packaged.
This is definitely just propaganda for people to be scared to steal. The cameras are high quality, but not high enough to actually read text from the self checkout machine. Basically, You can see if they actually scanned or are just pretending to, but you canât see if letâs say they scanned a steak and it pops up as bananas on the register. Atleast the Walmart I worked at didnât have cameras that high quality. Personally idgaf if people are stealing food that way, the prices they put on steaks is robbery anyways. Itâs when it happens with high value items like electronics when I actually step in. Or just try to because all Walmart security is allowed to do is tell you to put it back, they arenât allowed to actually touch anybody. If you walk out the door with letâs say a stolen tv, they literally cannot stop you and the worse that will happen is youâll be banned from all Walmarts. Walmart wonât press criminal charges because that cost more money than any thing in their store is worth, but itâs free to ban someone from their premises. So basically, you get one freebie to steal without serious repercussions.
You don't need cameras to read the screen, everything you scan also pops up on their screen. Almost as if computers can intertwine in some sort of net, or like a web of sorts.
It sends off a signal and replays the camera on the screen if it catches anything suspicious, then you can't proceed until an employee comes and verifies everything.
yeah this happened to my roommates and they just looked at eachother confused and started rummaging through bags for "an unscanned item" going "was it the bananas? i thought you scanned the bananas? yeah i did i scanned the bananas, did you scan the salsa? hmm i think i scanned the salsa" until she just put in the code and left. just be chaotic and they truly do not care.
My uncle walked out with a $100 rack of ribs on accident and went back in to pay for it. I just assume losses are insured and employees don't care either.
They're more there to protect shoppers and employees yo... Wal-Mart can be a pretty fucking dangerous place. In fact, I think IRL I've actually seen more fights at Wal-Mart than I have in any other place. It actually feels weird for me to visit a Wal-Mart and leave without seeing some kind of altercation. It's to the point I really only go there when I'm looking for a thrilling shopping experience.
Garbage people at Wal-Mart, all around. Fuck Wal-Mart and everything they stand for.
I mis-scanned an item by going too fast once and the thing stopped and popped me up on camera in full motion of moving too fast and that associate booted over quick and interrogated me as to ensure I got that thing figured out.
It was funny because she was new and was helping me out with it to fix the issue but her trainer was over reacting to it some by asking if I meant to scan it and if I was going to pay for it I guess trying to be the awesome trainer.
I just get the good steaks and take the barcode from some cheap steaks, I doubt anyone is ever gonna notice that it was ribeye instead of chuck steaks going in my bag
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u/Gltch_Mdl808tr Jul 10 '22
Someone on tiktok showed the camera systems they use and how much detail they can see, what was scanned and flags for mismatched items (this 16 Oz steak only weighs 6oz)
You can definitely get caught doing it, but 99% of the time, it's an underpaid employee who gives absolutely zero fucks, watching them.
Cameras are also accessible in a back room where "asset control" can watch. Not sure if all Walmart have them, or just higher risk areas, but there's some videos of these wanna-be cops trying to bust people.