5% of an organization's revenue is lost to employee theft each year. Owning buyback companies over the years, these were two of the most basic (yet crafty) ways the employees would try to steal phones.
1) eBay Buyer + Pack n' Ship employee. This was when we tracked models on the shelf and not the IMEI. One person would create an eBay account and buy 4-5 low-end phones daily for a week. My employee working in the shipping department would instead pull iPhones off the shelf and send them in place of the cheaper models. This went on for almost a month until we did a "surprise" inspection to sort out why our inventory was off. (Bummer part was at the time, there was no GSMA Blacklist to kill those IMEI's).
2) Trash bags + $$ for the Security team. We again were off with our inventory numbers. Upon looking at the security footage, we noticed one employee keeping a really clean workstation. So clean they visited the dumpster three times a day. We announced that from that point forward we'd use a metal detector wand on every trash bag headed out. This would-be criminal was so dense they went to our head of security to "cut him in" on every phone he stole by fake using the wand while it remained turned off. Needless to say, his plan was foiled.
By the way, the head of the security firm we used...? It was George Abdelmalak's Dad! That's right...George of Blancco fame! (I know George personally and the apple didn't fall far from the tree). 😎
What's your best/worst cellphone theft story?
