(When I was a kid, my parents had an allotment garden on the edge of the town, where they used to grow lots of vegetables and fruits. Near the lane, there was a bramble. One day, my mother sees a small family, shamelessly eating OUR blackberries from it! My mom goes to take a look and speak up to them.)
Lady: “Are these blackberries yours, ma’am? Really, delicious!”
(Seriously, what the…?)
Being a naive freshman, while standing in front of my locker, I remove my purse in order to put my coat on, after which I plan to put it back on over the coat. First Big Mistake. I look away for a moment. Second Big Mistake. My purse is now gone.
Approximately three days later, I enter my English classroom. The teacher is standing there holding a very familiar object. My purse. Apparently, the thief decided to bring it to class, stuck it under her chair, and forgot about it.
After the class, the teacher recognized it as mine. Apparently, no one else he taught had one made of black denim with a GameBoy Advance inside. Oddly, despite having had the time to remove and/or sell the contents, nothing inside had even been touched.
Yes, there were thieves at my high school, but they happened to be idiots.
I work in a home improvement store that has a store points card and a store credit card. We had just opened a new location and therefore have a lot of new staff who aren’t as experienced at catching scammers.
Two days in a row a man has come in and bought an expensive grill with a fake credit card. However, because of how we process payments this isn’t brought to our attention until the next day when the accounting department notices several big purchases did not go through. However the third day we are already on alert and because of our security cameras we know what he looks like and thankfully, one of the senior staff members has the pleasure of interacting with him.
She immediately becomes suspicious when the man starts asking about the same model of grill that has been stolen. While she pretends to look up information on the grill she actually looks for his picture in our company email and identifies him.
She doesn’t want to scare him away or give him time to leave by calling the police so instead she sells him the grill…
… and the company credit card.
She convinces him to open a card and so he willingly fills in an application with his full name, address, social, etc.
After he leaves she contacts the police, gives them all the information including the CCTV footage, and reports from the account about the credit card charges.
The guy is caught at his house with tens of thousands of dollars with of stolen items (not just from our store) and a bunch of fake credit cards.
In the early 1990s I was working my way through college in a national shoe chain known for its inexpensive shoes. The most expensive pair we sold was $50. It wasn’t uncommon for me to be alone on shift. One day I open, which among other things involves marking the weekly sale items with these sticky green cardboard tags that would hang off the edge of the box, displaying the sale price ($5, $10, etc). The original thought with these tags is that they could be reused, so they are almost the stickiness of post-its. I open up, take the old sale tags down, put the new sale tags on, and wait for customers. Half an hour after I finish, the first customer of the day comes in.
She heads directly for the women’s 8 1/2s and after greeting her I let her browse and try on stuff in peace. 10 or so minutes later, she’s brought a pair of shoes up to the register to check out. I immediately notice the $19.99 shoes have a $5 tag on it — and I know I did not put it there, nor has this style ever been on sale (no possibility I missed taking a tag off).
I ring her up; gee, what a surprise. It’s $19.99. She protests, demanding the “sale price.” I shake my head, saying no. She continues to protest but is losing steam over my wall of no. Finally I sigh and let her know I just tagged the items on sale that morning, she was the only one in so far, and I could check the video footage (gesturing towards the wall mounted curved mirror in the corner), but I was pretty sure the tag just happened to fall off and into the box below, right?
She turns pale, pays, and leaves. I go back to the aisle and she’s moved half the tags around, probably in an effort to bolster her story. It mystifies me to this day why anyone would risk a class one misdemeanor for theft, which carries up to $1,000 fine and/or 180 days in jail, to get a cheap pair of shoes.
The company eventually made the glue on the back of the tags too strong for would-be thieves to try this stunt. The real kicker to this: we, as wasn’t unusual at the time, didn’t have a security camera. The mirror was just that — a mirror.
Back in the 1970s, I remember reading a catalog from an electronics company. On the last page, next to the order form, they had this note:
“Make ordering easy! Just send us a signed check made out to us. Don’t fill in the amount. Let us add it all up, including shipping, and calculate the total, then we’ll write it on your check for you.”
My thought was, “yeah, it will also eliminate that unsightly balance in my checking account.”
