With most big supermarkets using anti-theft alarms and guards at store exists and barcodes to prevent price tags from being transferred from one product to another, two suspects in Larceny used a quite clever tactic to beat these measures when they stole a Blu-ray DVD player at a Wal-Mart store.
Wal-Mart staff first became suspicious when they spotted an empty Blu-ray player box and a DVD/VCR unit in the store's pet supply section. They checked the inventory of the DVD player, which showed up as sold. To try find out what happened to the DVD/VCR's packing, they checked over CCTV footage around the time the unit was flagged as sold and saw footage of a lady with the Blu-ray player in her shopping cart. At the time, a male suspect put the DVD/VCR unit in his shopping cart and both headed to the pet supply section.
Once in the pet section, they took both products out of their packaging, then put the Blu-ray player in the DVD/VCR's packaging and sealed it back up. Finally, they put a can of dog food into the cart and headed for the check-out, leaving the DVD/VCR unit and the Blu-ray packaging behind. With the Blu-ray player hidden inside the DVD/VCR packaging, they paid the $60 price of the DVD/VCR, in-turn cheating the Wal-Mart out of a $300 Blu-ray player as they left the store without anyone noticing anything suspicious until it was too late.
The police have been notified and the Virginia Beach Police are on the lookout for the two suspects. The female suspect is estimated to be 30 to 35 years old, around 5'7" and 170lbs and the male suspect is estimated to be 35 to 45 years old, around 5'9# and 200lbs. The male has a pot belly, visible thinning of the hair with a bald spot on top and a moustache.
As the suspects would need a HDTV set to make full use of their stolen player, it would be interesting to see how they managed to get that. Surely if they bought their HDTV, they should have been able to afford the Blu-ray player. Even if they are stealing the players to sell off again, they are unlikely going to get away with this method of scam once other stores find out what’s been happening.
They're going to need a 1080p set to go with that Blu-ray player. I can't wait to see how they get that into a different box.
I guess you haven't heard of the concrete block in a box trick. People buy something like a TV and then return it with the box full of concrete blocks. You gotta be pretty dumb not to notice this, but we're talking about Wal-mart here.
So now I guess if you look "suspicious" you will be subjected to an airport type screening of your purchases where some Neanderthal making 8 dollars an hour digs through all your packages on the way out...... Or they will open any fancy electronincs at the register to verify the contents holding up the line.
Damn, Doc you beat me to it.
Anyway, this isn't a new scam, people were trying this 16 years ago when I worked at Target with all sorts of products. Also, since they made it out of the store, probably nothing will happen to them. In fact, at least in Ohio, they'd only get a slap on the wrist since $300 is below the threshhold for grand theft.
Priceless!, $300 isn't worth spending hard earned tax payer money going after these crooks. They stole and it's wrong but maybe Wal-Mart might tighten their security yeah right lmao.
I think when I was at Target the threshhold was $500 for grand theft. Police didn't even want to come out if it was less, but IIRC we did get to count price+tax and if it was a sale item we got to count it at regular price. Not sure if this was by state, local or county law.
It was also funny when an employee would get busted for theft. Security would say "we caught you with this, but we also know you stole xxxx - we have it on video" and the person would break down and confess to a bunch of stuff they stole. It was a safe bet if security told somebody they had proof of other theft that they had nothing - if they did, they would've busted the person the first time they knew they were stealing.
Well the store made an abvious fault by selling a unit that supports VCR - who uses those anymore?!
Walmart is an evil rich company that make too much profit while other, more deserving stores, suffer. These disenfranchised shoppers were merely "redistributing" some of that wealth in order to increase their "piece of the pie".
What's wrong with that?
I think its funny as hell. Cant believe they even got away with that. Its almost too stupid to be real.
You know how they combat this problem?
RFID tags embedded into the product itself... especially the expensive veriety... and if a "blue ray" rfid hasn't been scanned by the registers.. it beeps upon leaving the store..... ahem, that is, if they don't insert it into a LEAD LINED bag before leaving.. which would be suscpicious in itself.
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