During my thirty years of Loss Prevention Investigations into what many refer to as white collar crime (employee theft or internal theft) I have come across some pretty bizarre reasons told to me by the employee thieves that I have caught.
There have been several cases where the employee thief stated that the reason that they stole from the business was that they were not given enough time off for job interviews at other business. OMG! This is weird on many levels. Number 1, I had serious problems connecting the two. How did you get from not getting time off to stealing thousands of dollars in cash and merchandise? It must be because the company is just one of those very “evil employers” that we hear about in the news all the time. Of course, the employee criminal kind of forgot to mention that the employer was the one to hire them in the first place, train them and pay them faithfully. It couldn’t be the employee’s fault…could it?
Another one that I always get a laugh (or headache) out of is the “I needed the money for my pharmaceutical problem” (not the kind you get from your Pharmacy). OK, let’s be fair and look at it from their point of view:
“I have an illegal (insert drug du jour here) habit that I have to feed sometimes hourly. I need the money. Holding up a bank seems like a lot of effort. Plus you have all those pesky exploding dye packs and gunfire associated with bank robberies. I know! I will just steal it from my employer. Can’t get shot doing that.” (some countries you can, oh well)
Another one on my top ten hit list is the “You didn’t give me my raise on time” excuse. So they decide to take it out on their evil employer. In the follow-up on those cases I can remember with this excuse, I recall that most of them were not even going to get a raise because they were not a very good employee. Maybe if they put more effort into their job? What a concept, work hard, get paid and go home, not jail.
And yes the majority of these people went to jail and got sued. Some of them we even let the IRS know about since they “forgot” to by taxes on their stolen gains. Maybe with all that, white collar crime is not a profitable idea.
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