Gadgetory

a Silicon Valley executive is trading conference rooms for court rooms this week as he faces four felony counts of burglary the accusation running a bar code scam to buy Legos at a fraction of their actual cost how you ask well the man allegedly covered up barcodes with forged labels that he created it turns out it's not that hard to print these up at home the result he paid far less than retail value at checkout the retail industry doesn't track barcode fraud separately but along with other losses it all adds up to a pretty penny we know that retailers lost over thirty five billion dollars in 2010 due to theft fraud and switching and replacing barcodes on store merchandise there are high tech fixes such as RFID tags but they come at a price some of the expensive solutions are some of the new league design checkout systems that detect weight so all of the weights and measures are entered in every piece of information about that product comes in a cheaper line of defense is employee vigilance 92 95 percent of all products everywhere has a barcode physically printed on the box or the label they should know that if there's a sticky back label with a barcode that should raise a red flag so it goes back to training stores should also make sure point-of-sale terminals display specific details when a product is scanned so cashiers can match descriptions with physical items