With the British Retail Consortium about to publish figures (September) from its latest Retail Crime Survey, the cost of staff theft will once again be brought into sharp relief (in the last survey it accounted for a worrying 37% of retail crime losses!). Many of the actions by dishonest staff such as bogus refunds, on-sales, under-rings, loyalty card fraud and other forms of register theft have up to now been notoriously difficult to catch.
Naturally retailers are keen to stem this tide, which runs into the hundreds of millions annually, and I am happy to say that CCTV is playing an invaluable role in these efforts. One of the key battlegrounds is POS (Point of Sale), with Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) now being used as part of the retail security arsenal offering the potential for each cash register transaction to be associated with relevant CCTV footage. By tracking what is actually happening at individual registers, and the potential for matching to key inputs such as ‘refund', life is certainly not going to be so simple for the criminals within.