Claim: Retail cashiers commonly steal from customers by tricking them into requesting cash back and then pocketing their money.
Examples:[Collected on the Internet, 2004]
Something happened to me this past weekend that I wanted to alert everyone I know to be on the look-out for while shopping at Wal Mart, especially during the busy holiday season. This trip I had a buggy full buying stuff to outfit the deer camp and the usual purchases for home, in other words I had over $200 worth of goods to buy. When I checked out, I ran my Wal Mart credit card through the machine and pressed "No" to the question of "Do you want $20 cash back?"
The checker fooled around with the register and then asked me to run the card again because it did not work the first time. I don't recall pressing "No" again or even if the question came up on the card terminal. My biggest concern at that time was making sure I picked up all the bags around that carousel they use to bag your purchases. While I was moving my bags back to the cart, I didn't pay any attention to my receipt. Anyway, the next morning I looked at my receipt (I usually just throw it away without looking at it!) There was a line on it that read "$20.00 Cash Back" and another that said "Change Due 20.00."
I called the manager and told him what happened and that I did not request $20.00 back, nor did I get $20.00 back. He did not seem a bit surprised. It seems that is a scheme the cashiers use to slip $20.00 in their pockets at the customers expense. The manager said I could come back to the store for the credit but now I wonder how many times this has happened to me in the past that I did not catch. I am not sure if the cashier can override the "No" or if she charged the extra $20.00 during the second swipe of the card. At least this time, she got caught the next day but I would have loved to have caught her in the act the day it happened.
Please pay attention to your receipt and don't let these thieves steal your hard earned money!!
Origins: This message alerting readers to an alleged case of perfidy by a Wal-Mart cashier doesn't provide much detail, and it sounds an awful lot like an earlier piece which spread
the false claim that gas stations were imposing a surreptitious $10.00 surcharge on credit card customers. That is, a customer misunderstood or misinterpreted something that happened to her while shopping, but — despite not having any evidence of a deliberate attempt to defraud — was quick to write and circulate a message erroneously accusing retailers of wrongdoing.
The scenario expressed above is something that could simply have been a mistake, the result of a cash register malfunction or inattentiveness on the part of the cashier and/or the customer, rather than a deliberate theft. (There are also a few implausibilities here: most merchants only provide cash back when the purchaser uses a debit card, not a credit card, and cashiers don't generally have the ability to initiate a cash back request from their registers.) Lacking more detail about this incident and other examples of cashiers' consistent failure to return cash back to customers, we wouldn't be so quick to claim this as evidence of a widespread rip-off scheme.
Last updated: 3 December 2004
The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/scams/cashback.asp
