Eventually you get caught

There is all kinds of easy money like this to be made if you are willing to engage in criminal activity, but eventually you are doing to make a mistake or the police are going to get lucky. You only have to get caught once.

Lego?

Was this the guy buying Lego by sticking barcodes of cheaper Lego sets on the bigger sets?

Bar Code Battler

Did the store staff not notice that their checkouts were blipping e.g. widescreen plasma televisions as if they were Pot Noodles? Yes, I assume he was much subtler than that, but it's a odd mental image... and I can't stop thinking of the bit at the beginning of The Simpsons where they blip Lisa.

Didn't the stores notice?

"The doctored labels allowed the conspirators to buy the items for a fraction of the real price."

I thought of this idea years ago but assumed that checkout staff would spot it as soon as it was tried. Now, this man comes along and makes $1m using it !

I assume that some store's stock-taking had flagged up a discrepancy with the till revenue and that led to a deeper investigation, or maybe an eagle eyed checkout operator knew that a 32" lcd TV does not sell for only $40

He made 522 e-Bay sales and netted $1m so he was making a profit of $2000 on each item?

Was he putting $20 price labels on Rolex watches? I'd like to know more about this case so I can improve on his method. More details please.

Nothing new

I remember 'friends' of mine that would buy C64 games at places like Boots the chemist (do they still sell games and stuff?). Back in those days, the price on the box was manually entered into the till. So a quick swap of stickers on a £9.99 game to make it £2.99 and bingo, you got a cheap game. Of course it had to be in places like Boots so their staff wouldn't know the difference between a new release and a budget title.

Then again, when you could also copy games using an standard double tape deck, there were much easier ways to get cheap games back in the day :)

@Ashley

Its Maggie that gets scanned

man thats sad that i know that

@Ashley

You mean Maggie?

Paris, 'cos I'd blip her.

Self checkout anyone?

So, print your own barcode for a small amount, pick up your TV, attach fake barcode and walk to the self checkout lane.

"the till operator will spot it" - you're the till operator and unless you're pretty dense, you aren't going to turn yourself in.

NB My suggestions are not to be followed by anyone and may result in imprisonment and other unpleasant things happening.

Also, most self checkouts do have a weight sensor "Please place item in the bagging area" so you'll need to find some other item that weighs the same as a TV. Or if you figure out the barcode encoding for reduced products you'll even have a valid receipt for the item at the low price and could take it back later if it went wrong. I don't think the "It was reduced because it was out of date" argument is going to work on a TV though...

Just in case you didn't get it : Don't do this unles you are prepared to be arrested and go to prison.

Add me to the list of @ Ashley Pomeroy

It's Maggie they blip, not Lisa!!!!

But really,

You need to figure in the intelligence level of the average checkout person. I've gone through my local Tesco with a box of six bottles of wine, the scanner registers the barcode on the outside of the box and charges one bottle at £5.99 and that is all I am charged for six bottles. Or the time I took a shrink-wrapped pack of four cartons of orange juice and was only charged for one. These people either don't have a brain, or have become zombies due to the low level of mental activity required to do the job.

Checkout operators don't watch the screen

I did a stint at a large UK supermarket chain as a checkout operator as a summer job. A couple of things you all need to bear in mind.

Firstly, checkout operators are timed. You have to scan a certain number of goods per minute. If you regularly fail to achieve a pre-set average, you can get fired.

Secondly, when you are scanning items, you don't watch your screen. All you do is listen out for the "Beep"

Finally: How is a checkout operator supposed to know the difference between a £4 bottle of plonk and a £40 bottle of plonk ?

In our training, we were never told to read the screen to check what was coming up.

Providing the crooks don't put a goods to weigh sticker on a 42" plasma, and the goods are buried in a big trolley load of other stuff, most checkout staff wouldn't spot it.

Why..

..so long in Jail??

Aren't there dealers, terrorists, murderers and voilent psychos they could be concentrating on??

You should never generalise

There's a checkout jockey in a Morrisons near me that few Reg readers would count as braindead.

Clocked my VC "fsck Linux" tee shirt and asked me "what distro?"

Why would a cashier give a damn?

If you worked on your feet all day, taking a wage barely (if even) better than the minimum, would you really care if someone ripped off your employers who probably make more in a day than you see all year?

This sort of thing

Is why places like Toys-R-Us will sell you a piece of card for £299, then direct you to a counter where you can swop it for the laptop PC you actually wanted, which is in a secure area with a single employee checking all the details, against the receipt and signing the goods out.

Supermarkets do similar by selling empty DVD or CD cases which you can have filled on the way out at customer services.

These stores must have been pretty clueless to allow people to walk out with TV's and other high value goods without even a cursory check

Place your Onions on the belt.

Local supermarket with self service lanes, after each item is scanned or weighed a loud announcement is made, "Place your onions [or whatever item] on the belt." The overseer looks over and notes, yup, onions.

@ wayne & his onions

I'd do it just to see the reaction....

"Place your cucumber on the belt."

"Place your KY jelly on the belt"