You may have noticed those signs at your local fast food store offering cash or a free meal if you fail to get a receipt after you pay. Once they’re pointed out, you see them everywhere. Of course, this has nothing to do with making sure customers get a receipt for their records.
I’ve long known that the reason for this policy is to prevent store employees from canceling cash orders before they’re recorded and pocketing the customer’s payment. But I always assumed the problem was merely a case of petty employee theft and was more of a nuisance than anything else. Boy was I wrong.
Brian Krebs over at Krebs on Security has a post that shows how serious the scam can be. The post tells the story of a Jimmy John’s sandwich shop that lost almost $100,000 from the fraud and had to close temporarily.
This isn’t a megacorporation that can afford to write off fraud at that scale. It’s a mom and pop franchise that’s probably operating on the slimmest of margins. Part of the problem was that the owners didn’t have one of those signs incentivizing customers to make sure they got a receipt. They’ve remedied that, of course, but it was a $100,000 lesson.
The takeaway from this story is that even a very low tech scam can result in significant losses.