Theft...

[northwind]

Well, how do they do it? I did a wee bit of "loss prevention" in my last job. All at a pretty low level, but one time I was in an interview of a teller who'd been stealing cash for a while, from a branch I'd worked in. Very sad stuff. She'd started out nicking a piffling amount of cash just before christmas, since she was skint and wanted to give her son a better christmas. Then, well, that worked, nobody even missed it, and the car needs new tyres. And once you're a thief anyway, who cares if it's £10 or £1000?

If they paid enough for the work I do, I wouldn't have to do it. And it's not as though anyone was hurt by it, right? The branch holds a million quid in cash, they can't miss a few hundred here and there. And the bank's worth billions. What's the worst that happens, shares fall by a penny? Anyone with shares is going to be well off anyway, and off the back of hard working folks who can't afford to fix the car, never mind invest in shares. So why should I feel bad? They're probably insured against theft anyway, and the way they make their money's practically stealing. What's the difference between taking £30 from a single mum who just couldn't pay her credit card bill, and a single mum taking £25000 from her employers to make a hard life a wee bit less hard, and to make her son smile?

That's how you justify it. Not everyone could say all of that, but "They're insured" "I deserve better" "Why should they get it when I've got nothing" "They'll never miss it" "I need X" but most of all it's the way it snowballs I think. Not one of the cases I heard or read was caught on the first attempt, and they all started small then got worse. A colleague of mine started out paying his visa bill from a suspense account, then paid it back a few days later- just because of his bad cashflow. But the time between taking it and paying it back stretched till eventually he was about 3 months behind on the "repayments" and realised he couldn't keep it up. Then he did a bigger trick, quite a clever one in fact, but was caught out by bad luck. But in the first instance, it was just stupidity/desperation and wasn't even theft, just a zero-gain fraud.

Sort of like speeding. You speed on the 30 at the bottom of your road because it's a fast safe road, should be a 40. You speed on the motorway, because 70mph's stupidly slow and you're a good driver. But once you're speeding, well, no point in worrying about doing 40 past the shops because you speed everywhere else. 80's breaking the law anyway, why not do 160? It's all just degrees.

The Snowballing effect Northwind describes is certainly true. I genuinely think that after a while of getting away with it, people stop thinking rationally and imagine they cannot be caught and progressively get more and more reckless till they're caught.

I worked briefly as a turnstile attendent (well a day, before I told the manager what I thought of him ). The whole system was incredibly flawed and as they described it to me, I thought, "**** me, if I was dishonest, I could walk away with £2-3k today and no one would be any the wiser and they'd not be able to catch me/have any way of tracing me." I was absolutely gobsmacked by how wide open it was.

Essentially, it fell down on this premise:
You man a gate- at least several hundred, perhaps a few usand people, come through it. They are divided into 3 categories:

1. Full rate (pay £10)
2. Concessions (pay £7)
3. Season ticket holders (free)

You're given a few hundred pounds float (counted out by management and then checked and signed by you). You just take the money, give them change and press the button and let them through. All that is recorded is the number of people through the gate (not which category they fall into) and the "till" is a drawer divider type plastic thing, not a real till that records cash in and out.

At the end of the day, you would take the float out, call security to collect your till (no "count" on how much you had would be done yet). They'd carry it down to the managers, who'd then count it. To my knowledge, they didn't even check it tallied as a possible multiple of:

total = number of punters * (one of any number of possible combinations of £10 or £7)

In short, you could have pocketed the lot and claimed it was 900 season ticket holders who came through your gate. Obviously, they'd be highly suspicious, but short of finding the cash, there'd be no way of proving it. One day, on my first day as it happens, one till was low on cash - again, no way of proving by how much, but it was quite a way down compared to the others, moreso than the law of averages would normally yield. The two lads (friends of mine, devout Christians who wouldn't steal if they were starving, as it happens) whose till the money was "missing" from were dragged in front of the managers. Their bags were illegally searched (alone by a single member of staff, so had he found anything it'd mean nothing as he could have planted it ). They were illegally searched by the police. When this didn't turn anything up, the manager turned on me,
"Were you on their till at any point during the day?"
"Are you ****ing stupid? Why have you assumed it's us (turnstile operators) that has done it? Do you not realise both you and the security staff would have been in a better position to steal the money without being spotted actually doing it, as well as being able to steal more money in total whilst reducing detection by taking some money from each till, rather than one."
(Indignantly) "Well, it's not going to be me, is it?!"
"Is it your money? Did you have access to it? Would you stand to gain by taking it? You look like a prime suspect to me."
"Don't be smart"
"You're obviously no.t"
"If you don't like it it, you don't have to come back next week."
"Trust me, I won't be. I'm just hanging around to see the incompetent way you're dealing with this and to bear witness for my friends if you try to stitch them up."

As it happened, it was the two security guards. It seems that even their dim intelligence spotted the flaw in the system. The took a bit of money each week and shared it. To begin with it was a few hundred. After not getting caught they upped the amount. This gradually increased over the 2 years they ran the scam, till in the end they were getting £2K a week. The reason they finally got caught was largely chance. The idiots had been taking it from one till each week (rather than spread over all of them- cretins). They did this every week; the only reason they were caught out was that by chance an unusually high number of season ticket holders had been through the gate, they took the money from, so one till had about half what the others did. Apparently they appeared gobsmacked when they were caught.

Epilogue:
The idiot of a manager I was rowing with was sacked for gross incompetence and allowing a system where the theft could occur as well as his disgraceful treatment of his staff. My mates got an apology from the police (they were not read their rights and were strip searched in an unlocked public toilet- someone walked in while they were being searched).

My mate (a burly kickboxing coach) once caught a thief breaking into his garage to get his bike a couple of years ago. Phoned the police (who said "There's nobody in your area for 3 hours ".

Ended up taking actions into his own hands, and knocking the thief out cold before anything was stolen. The thief ended up covered head to toe in industrial shrink wrap and being dumped outside the local police station with a large A4 note saying "I'm a bike thief - please arrest me. Phone ********** for the evidence"

Later learned in the local rag he got 2 years for breaking and entering :P :P

which no doubt turned in to 6 months before release. Besides- what difference does a criminal record make to scum?! its only people with jobs that a minor record can screw! good work for the vigilante work! i think we should all stand up an confront these guys!!

Originally Posted by BLK SV

If you find a place that can get you a new cover for the tool box can you let me know, someones swiped mine aswell.

Cheers

Yeah, Suzuki Spares Direct on Harrow Road will sell you one for about £16.