Frank Abagnale - The Art of the Steal

MALL MADNESS

You go to the mall nowadays, and invariably, some guy will ask you, “You want to buy a gift certificate for the mall?” So you take one for two hundred dollars. He asks you what name to put on it. You tell him that you don’t know who you’re going to give it to, just leave it blank. You go home, type in a name, make fifty color copies at the local copy shop, and return to the mall. Companies that issue gift certificates vastly underestimate the quality of color copiers. Most gift certificates can be copied without a single telltale sign. In fact, in many cases the color copies actually look sharper and brighter than the originals.

These new mall gift certificates are wonderful, because they’re honored at virtually any store in a mall, as well as any store in other malls handled by the same management company. This is a great consumer benefit, and a great criminal benefit. A criminal will go to a mall in Miami, buy a gift certificate, make a hundred copies, and spend that same gift certificate in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and fifty other malls around the country. What a terrific way to travel during the holidays!

During the Christmas rush period, harried and inexperienced sales clerks haven’t a prayer. So you take your $200 gift certificate to the Gap, buy some $50 jeans, and get the $150 change in cash. You go to the frame shop, buy a $28 frame, get the change in cash. One of the things criminals love about gift certificates is they’re as good as cash. Most stores are happy to give cash when making change after a purchase. And since many companies reconcile their gift certificates only on a sixty-to-ninety-day cycle, criminals have plenty of time to complete their holiday shopping.

The security people at the malls call me all the time and say, “Hey, the mall’s getting killed. Thieves are hitting us with all these color-copied gift certificates.”

I tell them, “You have to put out a bulletin to all your store managers about the names on the gift certificates.”

“Uh, we don’t put names on them.”

“Well, you need to send a bulletin out about the serial number of the gift certificates,” I say.

“Uh, we don’t put numbers on them.”

“Well then, you need to tell me where you’re calling from so I can come and buy some of those gift certificates.”

Remember, if they have value, they’ll copy them.

SHOP ’TIL YOU DROP

Con artists have a particular fondness for store receipts. They’re a living in themselves. I was once visiting with the head of security for one of the big discount chains, and he was telling me how incredibly secure his stores were with all their cameras and gadgetry. “Really,” I said. “Well, let’s see.” I walked with him outside the store entrance, rooted around in the trash receptacle there, and fished out a receipt. Customers are constantly throwing away their receipts as soon as they leave a store. I examined the receipt and noticed it included a toaster oven. So I went with the security head to the small appliance area and picked out the same model toaster oven. I told the security director, “Now all I have to do is go to customer service, tell them I just bought this and need to return it, and I’ve just conned the store.”

Criminals aren’t content to just go with what they find in the garbage, and so naturally they make their own fraudulent receipts. Several years ago, Macy’s had a nagging problem with criminals. Armed with fraudulent receipts, the criminals went to the store, picked out the items they had listed on the fake receipts, and then returned them for cash. The clerks at Macy’s had no way of distinguishing a real receipt from a counterfeit one. I was brought in and redid the receipt by adding “Macy’s” on the back in thermochromic ink. Rub your finger over the word and the body heat causes it to disappear. Macy’s trains all of its help to check receipts with their fingers, and the problem has been cured.

A few years ago, there was a guy who drove all over the country in a white Cadillac who had his own inventive scam. One of the big store chains would regularly put its fine jewelry on sale for 50 percent off. This guy would anticipate these sales and go in and buy a necklace or bracelet at full price. The chain had an arrangement where, if you had bought an item of jewelry just prior to the sale, you could come in with your receipt and it would give you the difference back in cash. First, he would take his receipt to a local copy shop and make two hundred copies. Then he’d return the necklace and hit the road. Whenever he encountered another store in that chain, he would bring in one of his fraudulent receipts and get a refund of half the price. He didn’t need to show the necklace, just the receipt. He did this for years. He’d park his Cadillac illegally in the fire lane outside a store, dash in, collect his cash, and head to the next store. Eventually, the chain figured out how to stop him. It ceased offering the cash-back arrangement.

Some of the techniques used to fleece businesses are surprisingly simple, but they can be raised to the level of art by rings of criminals. If I had to anoint the King of the Receipt Scam, it would be Rondal Vickers. Vickers is a sixty-two-year-old Florida man, and an Air Force veteran with a generous white beard. He goes by the name Santa Claus. It’s an unlikely nickname, since he was the ringleader of a crime group composed of as many as twenty thieves known as the Vickers Gang. For more than thirty years, it carried out an elaborate refund scam that was reliant on counterfeit receipts and UPC labels. (In their spare time, the gang indulged in gift certificate fraud and insurance fraud, once collecting insurance claims six times on the same Corvette.)

Santa Claus pretty much had theft in his blood. He got started as a checkout cashier at a Winn-Dixie and augmented his paycheck by never ringing up purchases of beer. Whenever someone had beer mixed in with his groceries, he would pretend to have forgotten to ring it up, hit “no sale” on the register, and then ask for the amount, which he pocketed. From that beginning, he built a formidable organization. One of the masterminds was a fifteen-year-old runaway named Jodi Vickers, who became Santa Claus’ wife. The gang traveled all over the country, generally in “sprees” lasting six to eight weeks, and then they would return to their home base in Florida until they needed to steal some more money. They preyed on the national mass-market retail chains like Wal-Mart, Kmart, and Target. Santa Claus was particularly fond of Target, because it kept enhancing its security in order to foil him. To feed his ego, he relished the challenge of beating the toughest system, so he’d often send his soldiers to the other chains and devote his own devilish energies to Target.

The Vickers Gang had multiple scams in its arsenal, but its most common dodge was something it referred to as “marking down.” Members of the gang would visit one store in a chain and identify a sale item. For instance, they’d pick out a tent that was on sale for $19.95. They would jot down the UPC number, and with a hand-held UPC gun anyone can get from a retailer supply house, would make a counterfeit UPC label. They’d return with the label cupped in their hand and stick it over the actual UPC label of a higher-priced tent, say one selling for $129.95, and then put the tent in their shopping cart. They’d mosey around and pick up a shirt, some pants, a bottle of shampoo, maybe some chips and dip, enough other goods to get that receipt high enough to exceed $129.95. Say they’d get it to $149.95. At almost all stores, the receipts didn’t have what’s known as line-item detail. When you returned something, the store computer would read only the header at the top of the receipt. That header gave the date and time of transaction, as well as the total amount of the purchase, in this case $149.95. But the computer won’t search the list of items on the receipt and see if they matched a purchase record stored in the computer.