Read Hayes, a research scientist and criminologist at the University of Florida and the executive director of the Loss Prevention Research Council, said it was possible that Mr. Augustine’s use of uncooked pasta — which he described as “off the charts” — was meant to simulate the shifting sound of the pieces inside the box.
So this guy was able — at least 70 times — to return boxes and get a refund without it being noticed that the box did not contain the original Legos? It was enough that the box sounded as though it contained Legos. This worked 70+ times?! And the police act like it's cute and make puns.
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26 comments:
A novel green scheme that replaces plastic with pasta.
If I recall correctly, Wal-mart operated for years with Sam Walton's "no questions asked" return policy. I've also had several instances where I've gotten refunds from on-line sales with no need to return the product. I suspect that for most returns the items just wind up in the trash if they are actually defective.
"And the police act like it's cute and make puns."
Well, it's California. And the guy is black.
Recently, I bought something from Amazon and what arrived was the packaging for the item and there was no item. I followed the procedure for a refund but they instructed me on how to send the item back. Now, what's the difference between what I would send back and what would be sent back by a customer who received an item, kept it, and sent back the empty packaging. What was achieved by requiring me to jump through that hoop? Would it even work or would they tell me I forgot to send it back? I decided to cut my losses and do nothing.
As crimes go, it *is* kind of cute, though, compared to mobs doing a smash and grab at the local jewelers, posh scumbags shoplifting from Whole Foods, or even just porch package thieves. It's an old fashioned, nonviolent scam, no guns, no knives, no screaming, no tiresome ideological flimflam about theft as social justice or whatever. Just a crook and his honest . . ah, forthright pursuit of ill-gotten gains.
That said, I'm curious exactly what he was stealing. $34K for 70~80 incidents averages to over $400 per incident. If that's 70~80 sets, most of those have to be on the more expensive side as Lego goes. Or did he buy a bunch of Star Wars UCS Millennium Falcons ($850) and return them to bring that average up? That said, if he's reselling individual pieces on Bricklink, I guess he could conceivably make more than the original purchase price, especially if there's limited run figures or special parts, although the effort involved in sorting and shipping seems like he might as well just get a normal job instead.
I don't understand the fascination with LEGOs. To me, they're just a field experiment minefield for night home invaders.
LEGO is opening a huge factory near me. I can't stand it.if
The internet informs me that it's called "switching" so whoever thought he was being clever by calling it a pasta-and-switch as if it were analogous to a bait-and-switch might not have been all that clever on that one.
The police could make pasta puns, or chide Target for being a target due to their inattentiveness by relying on the honor system.
What responsibility does Target have? The customer service rep should have looked in the box.
I just bought a t-shirt on Amazon, and mistakenly ordered the wrong size. I requested a return, and they refunded my money and told me not to bother sending it back.
"I don't understand the fascination with LEGOs."
There are tiny ones called "nanoblocks" (knockoffs under other names). I think 1/8 the size of Legos, they're a good diversion.
I wonder whether the analysis figured in the cost of the pasta. I mean, it's a lot less than the cost of Legos, buy it's not nothing.
My husband says that his mom (a single mother with no college and a deadbeat ex who managed to keep herself and her sons off public assistance) used to practice product arbitrage back in the days of cash refunds: she'd peruse the papers to see what was on sale in one store - possibly even in a different nearby town- and buy a bunch of that item, then return the items, piecemeal, to stores where they weren't on sale for full-price refunds without receipts. She was (and is) tiny, cute, and persuasive, which helped.
She had a close call with Jabba the Hutt action figures in the later days of this scheme as stores were starting to crack down on both receiptless returns and returns of multiples of the same item: she bought a stack of these action figures and found that no store would accept more than one of them back, no matter how tiny, cute, and persuasive she was. My husband says the stack of boxes just stayed in the garage, a monument to her cleverness and desperation, for months. But she did eventually unload all of them.
Someone should interview the people at Amazon who deal with return fraud. It's quite prevalent.
There used to be a veritable industry centered around Home Depot returns. I knew a guy who was constantly buying and retuning things. He'd find an item on clearance at one store and return it for store credit at another then sell the store credit at a discount. I remember one time he found tubes of epoxy construction adhesive on clearance for like $10/tube and bought hundreds. These were normally $70 items. Home Depot allows returns with no receipt a limited number of times, so he would enlist people to return things for him. He knew the price of everything at HD, and made quite a bit of money doing this.
Bed, Bath & Beyond was one of the early promoters of 'no questions asked, no receipt needed' returns policies. I think it's one of the reasons they went out of business, although it took quite a while.
My sister worked there for a while, and she had a whole series of bizarre stories, all of them involving some form of hustle. People would routinely trot in products that BB&B didn't sell, even name brands that they had never sold. All of it left to the manager's discretion. There were routine circulars sent around with the most egregious fraudsters on them, kind of like the 'Most Wanted', so stores could act, if they felt like it. She said most of the time, it wasn't policed at all. At least this guy wasn't smashing display cases with a hammer, or wheeling out full shopping carts right out the front door. I bet that's how the police are looking at it. How far we have fallen.
L.L. Bean used to have lifetime returns, but ~10 years ago they stopped and gave store managers discretion. This was because people started harvesting old Bean clothes from thrift stores and returning them in bulk.
REI's nickname was once "Return Every Item."
You can be generous in a high trust society but not in other societies. When different types of human tribes interact they often get like this -- around others but not on the same team.
"Diversity is not our strength. Diversity causes tension. Let's form a clique in this neighborhood. Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." Just ask Ilhan Omar.
We did something similar in junior high school with Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" album at Zayre's department store.
Back then, large staples in the empty corner often held the price tag and the album and the paper sleeve motionless inside the cardboard record cover.
So, we used needle nose pliers to straighten the prongs of the staple and remove it, freeing the record sleeve. Switched the Black Sabbath record for an old Mitch Miller record, put it in the sleeve and put the staple back in through the existing holes in the record jacket and sleeve (so the customer service person could not inspect). And convinced a guy we called "Bonehead" to return it for a refund.
The best part wasn't getting the album for free. It was imagining the impression on the face of the person who bought the Black Sabbath album, only to hear "Roll Out the Barrel" by Mitch Miller's band when he put it on the turnable.
I don't blame the police for taking this opportunity to attempt a pun. It is totally a punworthy crime. (I mean, nobody died. It's not as if a man poisoned his wife and the cops' take was "Cyanide? More like gynocide, amirite?")
I feel sorry for anybody who can't laugh at life. It's especially useful to be able to laugh at tragedy. Of course this isn't a tragedy. This is just Petty criminal behavior.
I have no problem with the police having some fun with the nature of the crime (though “pasta and switch” is weak; it doesn’t sound like “bait and switch” or make sense) so long as they treat the crime itself seriously and throw the book at the guy. The damage people like him do to the fabric or our society goes much further than just the value of the legos
The proper pun is "cut and pasta," no? CC, JSM
Retuning 70+ times and nobody suspected why is this guy coming back to return stuff so often? Are we not noticing faces, now? The one thing that is supposedly acutely tuned in our brains?
There is something more mysterious about this story than the mere lego theft. And I'm not going to just let it go.
Oh, it's a mail order scam.
Never Mind -- Emily Litella
Now available the Lego Hoosegow kit. For sentences 3-5 years.
Everything old is new again.
Jack Bennie (yeah, I'm old) always had the "cheap" jokes ready for a laugh.
I recall an episode where he'd bought (hundreds?) of canned peanuts with a single nut left in the returned can.
No, just assemble the Lego thing. Take it apart and then send it back, the fun is in putting it together, and everyone likes tearing things apart.
The reason that this product return scam works is that stores are really bad about not spending the manpower to actually check the products being returned. A friend of mine actually bought an air conditioner and when he got home and opened the box, it was somebody's old, broken unit. (And it wasn't even the same brand.)
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