How to prevent Staff Theft

June 29th, 2008

Is staff theft and fraud affecting your profits? Find out out how to protect yourself, your stock and your bottom line.

Retail crime is an expensive problem for company’s according to a new report by the British Chambers of Commerce which puts the annual cost of crime against business at £12.6 billion - an increase of 20 per cent since its previous survey in 2004. 3,900 businesses were surveyed nationwide and they found that 59 per cent had experienced at least one crime in the previous 12 months. This survey reflect Salgado’s own survey published as Thieving Little Britains.

Jorge Salgado-Reyes, Senior Loss Prevention investigator for Salgado Investigations, says that this holds true for most retailers, with shoplifting (external theft) being the most common cause of business loss, followed by staff theft.

The common shrink split is 70/25/5 per cent (external/internal/other) and depending on the type of retailer this is a fairly accurate split of their losses. But according to Jorge internal theft hits a business harder due to the insidious nature of the crime. It is known as “Theft Employee” and is the dark side of Loss Prevention.

Why does it hit harder? Well Jorge gives one example, imagine that you when you get home tonight, you discover that you have been the victim of a burglary. How do you feel? terrible? Then you report it to the police and they investigate it and during the course of the investigation they discover that the burglar is a friend of yours. How do you feel now? Betrayed? So what is the difference between being burglared by a stranger or a friend? The difference is that your friend has abused your friendship, your trust!

Out of a workforce, it is estimated that 25 per cent of your staff will never steal, 50 per cent may steal if given the opportunity, and the last 25 per cent will always steal. In other words potentially up to 75 per cent of your staff may steal if given the opportunity to do so.

When a member of the public steals an item, they are stealing the cost price of that item (i.e. item - retail price £29.99 - Cost price 5.99) while when a member of staff steals £30 from the till, they are stealing the retail cost i.e. the entire £30.

As you can appreciate, staff theft is a very real and significant problem.

According to Jorge Salgado-Reyes, staff theft is a more common problem than retailers care to admit. And breaking through this barrier of denial is crucial to helping businesses reduce their internal losses.

Salgado investigations offers a holistic approach to tackling staff theft including the use of a confidential staff hotline for staff to report their suspicions about other dishonest staff. Reviewing a company’s security and loss prevention procedures, the use of covert CCTV, test purchasing, GPS tracking of distribution fleets, and undercover operatives being entered into the work force.

Ultimately, the question should not be whether you can afford to implement security measures but whether you can afford not to.

Jorge adds: “Don’t turn a blind eye to staff theft, if you accept it, you will be nurturing a culture of staff dishonesty where your dishonest staff teach new staff to steal and you will start to lose money at an exponential rate.”

Posted in Retail, Surveillance, General, Fraud, Retail Fraud Prevention | 2 Comments »

FREE E-Legal | Gathering Private Investigator Directory

June 18th, 2008

E-Legal | Gathering new private investigator directory has just gone live. Free to current members of the forum, the PI Directory is currently being swamped with messages from it’s members to be included.

At the anniversary of ELG inclusion to the directory will no longer be free but until then, all ELG members who are practising PI’s will get a free listing.

Posted in Networking, Private Investigators | No Comments »

Using GPS Trackers to confirm your worst suspicions

May 23rd, 2008

People tend to want to jump straight into using a Private Investigator to find out if your better half is actually your worst nightmare. But sometimes that like using a hammer to crack a nut.

A better option when you are not sure if or when it’s happening is to use a GPS tracker on their car to gather intel. This will give you an indication of when its happening and once you have these patterns then you send in the PI’s to obtain those all important photos that will prove beyond any doubts that they are indeed “bumping nasties”.

Even better than using one tracker is when you use 2 trackers. This only works if you already know who the other person is. If you put a tracker on your partners car and another one on the other person’s car that you think they are having an affair with, then you can watch on the internet as the 2 trackers converge.

And so I recommend that a GPS tracker is used for a few weeks or months before hand to gather that intelligence that will enable the Investigator to intelligently target the subject and gather the footage that is required for your peace of mind.

Posted in GPS Trackers | No Comments »

Do you suspect your partner is cheating on you?

May 22nd, 2008

When someone thinks their partner might be involved in an affair outside their relationship, doubts can persist and linger so much as to want to confront them, but suspecting that they are cheating and proving it are two different things.

When you are in a relationship there might come a time when you will start feeling that your partner is cheating on you and you might not feel like ignoring the instincts because they might be true.

So what do you do and what are the signs of a cheating partner?

In my experience, if you suspect it, it’s highly probable that it’s true and the only thing left to do is to prove it.

There are many ways of conducting surveillance including using GPS trackers, following them with private investigators, testing your partners computers or mobile phones for deleted messages.

But at the end of the day, you will have to decide what you are going to do about it after having the proof. Tell me folks, what would you do?

Posted in Surveillance | No Comments »

e-Legal | Gathering detectives investigate what’s on offer at IFSEC 2008

May 15th, 2008

YESTERDAY 3 PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS FROM E-LEGAL | GATHERING WENT ALONG TO IFSEC 2008 TO SEE WHAT THE FUSS IS ABOUT.

Jorge Salgado-Reyes (Salgado Investigations - Archangel Research Limited), Neil Sheppard (Trident Investigations Limited) and Fouad Khattab (The Arabian Knight Limited), founder members of e-Legal | Gathering went along to IFSEC 2008 and spent 4 long hours prowling the stalls on the hunt for new gadgets that would enhance their covert surveillance businesses.

There were hundreds of stalls displaying the CCTV industry’s best and not so best CCTV surveillance gadgets.

My favourite was one stall that had a small black ball slightly smaller than a golf ball with an integrated colour camera, microphone, USB connector and integrated DVR. The only problem with the gadget was it there was no real application for us but anyone that did extreme sports would like as it very light in weight.

The same stall had very small (half the size of a packet of cigarettes) DVR with a button camera at a very cheap price.

Lastly it had a vehicle DVR Which again was light weight and cheap.

Posted in Surveillance, General | No Comments »