He was a vault associate at a store in Arizona. Duties included collecting cash from and distributing to registers as well as running cash to and from the bank. Swapped fake $100 bills that had “PLAYMONEY” as the serial number for real bills. May have swapped nearly $400k over a period of more than 3 years! Seems like he should have been caught sooner. See links. Cal https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/04/us/home-depot-counterfeit-arrest/index.html https://www.businessinsider.com/home-depot-worker-swapped-387k-with-fake-money-officials-say-2022-2
I just looked these bills up on Amazon. At a glance, they look pretty good. Not good enough to get away with four years of bill swapping. I most imagine if this fellow were handling the cash for a major retailer then he would slip a few bills in the middle of a stack and it just didn’t get noticed. I was surprised you can buy stacks of these bills…. Well, maybe not too surprised.
I worked there for well over 3 years. In a 60 Million or so gross store, hardware thefts alone were over 2 million, 7 million or more storewide according to a department manager! Very passive when it comes to holding thieves accountable, probably more inside perpetrators too as indicated in this story.
Stupid idea, yeah he got away for a bit but as he's serving his sentence I'm sure he'll realize it was a really stupid idea especially since all his peers now see him as a criminal! That's shameful!
Wow, in one store? Anyway yeah I too am amazed that anyone could get away with this, much less for years. "an unusually high number of fake bills" Apparently I shouldn't be amazed.
Last month, I got to hand count roughly $30,000 for my child’s school fundraiser. I found 1 fun radar note, 1 red ink $2 bill, 1 war nickel, and 1 W quarter. (Which I replaced). I also found: I knew instantly when my fingers touched it. But it’s so close visually that the obvious “motion picture” things didn’t even catch my eye. This has fooled everyone I have shown it to.
We had customers with special orders at Home Depot come in only to be told that their $2000, etc. orders had disappeared out the front door. Someone likely on the inside at HD alerted a thief to strike at the right time. They had to fire the night crew at a local store for all being in on thefts.
I worked at lowe's as a manager for about 6 years. Near the beginning of my run we had a loss prevention person fired for return fraud, he was even deleting things off the cameras. Took 6-8 months for the store to catch on and another month or so to gather enough evidence. There's alot of loss in those stores, people don't realize. My store was pretty good and it was a low theft area but plenty of stuff still walked out the front door. Never had a money issue that I'm aware of. Every register has a camera on it and there's a camera in the vault room as well, at least at my store there was. Money didn't get brought to the bank, there was a slot from the vault to outside and Brinks or other armored truck service would pick up and drop off from outside the building. Pretty secure actually.
I'm guessing, but I suspect the bills were placed in straps going to bank. Bank would adjust deposit as "counterfeit", and I suspect it was assumed that the cashiers were taking them. Speaking of, I wonder how difficult it is to get a counterfeit through the machine for the self checkouts.
That means others in the system were not doing their jobs. Or inside job for a while or embarrassment for upper management.
