45 StateWays Q www.stateways.com Q March/April 2014
the Hayes survey, one out of every 40 employees was ap-
prehended for theft by their employers in 2012. Bregar,
who, over his 20+ years in loss prevention, has person-
ally conducted over 2,300 employee-theft investigations,
said, "When someone says to me, 'Oh, no! My employees
would never steal from me,' then I know the employees
are stealing, because the employer has stuck his head in
the sand and isn't looking for it." Bregar has seen family
members and childhood friends steal from retailers.
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
" T
he biggest mistake retailers make is that
they don't start talking about loss pre-
vention right from the very beginning,"
said Bregar. "They're not establishing the employee's
mindset correctly from the beginning." The Mont-
gomery County DLC sets the tone right away. In ad-
dition to the normal procedures used by the county's
human resources department, the DLC itself does
its own background checks of potential hires. "We
will not take anyone with positives for violence, for
theft or for drug and alcohol abuse," said Wurdeman.
In its stores, the Montgomery County DLC uses a
system that matches the video footage from the cameras
trained on the store's check-out lanes with the transac-
tion data from its point-of-sale (POS) system. Loss-
prevention experts strongly recommend having such a
system. "To everyone around them, it may look like they
are ringing up a bottle of Grey Goose, but they could
really be entering a void or a no sale," explained Bregar.
At the DLC, certain kinds of transactions, such as
returns, are spot-checked on a regular basis using this
system.
Some security systems, such as the ones from3xLogic
(3xlogic.com), can be set to send certain kinds of transac-
tions to the system's "dashboard," so a retailer can just
click on a button for "no sales" and literally watch all
the "no sales" that have been rung. 3xLogic systems can
even be programmed to send an alert to the retailer's cell
phone, with the footage attached, any time a certain kind
of transaction is rung, so that the retailer can review it
seconds after it's occurred.
When it comes to retail crime, "you try to eliminate
as many pitfalls as you can," said DLC's Montes De Oca.
Deterring and detecting retail crime is simply a part
of doing business.
Contact Debra Welter
Tel: 847-720-5614
Fax: 847-720-5601
dwelter@specialtyim.com
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