Refund scams: how to protect your checkout from unscrupulous sellers

Common fraud schemes with returns and cancellations

Dishonest salespeople use several typical schemes to misappropriate money by taking advantage of weak control at the retail point:

• Fake product cancellation (money in the pocket). The cashier scans the product, takes money from the customer, but does not issue a receipt. As soon as the customer leaves, the salesperson cancels (deletes) this product from the open sale. As a result, the product virtually returns to warehouse stock, while the salesperson keeps the cash. The shortage of such a product is detected only during inventory, and most often its value is deducted from the entire materially responsible team.

• Return under someone else's badge. A salesperson can process a fake product return by using another employee's badge (barcode). This is done to withdraw cash from the cash desk and divert suspicion of fraud away from themselves.

• Imitation of a "terminal failure". If the bank POS terminal is not integrated with the accounting program, the salesperson enters the amount manually. They can misappropriate the customer's cash by telling the owner that the terminal supposedly failed and the money did not reach the account.

• Misappropriation of the customer's discount. The salesperson tells the customer the full product price, does not issue a receipt, and processes the purchase in the program with a discount, using someone else's or their own discount card. The cashier keeps the difference between the full price and the discounted amount.

• Replacing price tags. The salesperson (or their acquaintance acting as a customer) replaces the barcode from a very cheap item with one on an expensive item. At the checkout, the product is sold at a low price, causing direct losses to the owner.

How Torgsoft helps protect the cash desk from fraud

To protect against theft, the program offers a comprehensive set of tools based on strict restriction of staff permissions and full auditing.

1. Configuring access permissions (Roles)

The main security step is to restrict permissions for the "Salesperson" or "Trainee" roles so that they can perform only basic sales functions and do not have access to data manipulation.

• Prohibition on deleting a product from a sale. In the program settings, you can prohibit the salesperson from independently deleting an already scanned product from the receipt. If the product was added by mistake, an administrator will need to be called to delete it.

• Mandatory recording of the cancellation reason. If you leave salespeople the right to delete products, be sure to enable the «Register deletion of product from sale» function. Then, each time a product is deleted, the program will require selecting a reason from the list, entering an explanation manually, or scanning the badge of the responsible manager. The owner will be able to see all such cancellations in a special report.

• Restricting access to stock balances and the cash desk. Salespeople can and should be restricted from viewing cash balances in the cash desk and product quantities in the warehouse. If the salesperson does not know the "book" balance, they will not be able to adjust the actual amount of money or products when handing over revenue or conducting inventory.

2. Safe return processing

• Returns only by receipt barcode. The safest way to process a return is to scan the barcode from the customer's fiscal or sales receipt. The program will automatically pull up exactly those products, at the same prices and with the same discounts that were recorded at the time of sale. This eliminates errors and abuse by cashiers.

• Individual responsibility. The return amount is always deducted from the revenue of the team or employee who directly made the original sale, regardless of which salesperson physically processes the return at the cash desk.

• Blocking returns for certain products. The owner can set a ban on returning a specific product (for example, a discounted item), after which the salesperson will technically be unable to process a return and issue money for it.

3. Synchronization with the bank terminal

• Automatic amount transfer. Connecting a bank terminal to Torgsoft ensures that the payment or return amount is transferred to the POS terminal automatically. This eliminates the human factor, manual entry errors, and fraudulent schemes where a salesperson imitates a terminal "failure".

• Blocking payment method manipulation. To prevent employees from closing a cashless receipt as a cash receipt, the owner can disable the ability to clear the checkbox for using the bank terminal during payment. The program will always send the command to the terminal, and there will be no other way to close the receipt.

• Safe card refunds. The system automatically records card data during the sale (RRN, authorization code). Thanks to this, funds can be returned only to the same card from which the payment was made.

4. Full audit through the "Action Log" 

Torgsoft continuously maintains the «User Action Log» and the document change log. Any deletion of a financial document, receipt cancellation, price change, or invoice adjustment is strictly recorded by the system: the owner can always see the date, time, amount, and name of the user who performed the suspicious action.

5. Discount card control 

To prevent a salesperson from entering a discount card number from memory to apply a discount instead of the customer, it is worth enabling the setting «Prohibit the salesperson from entering the discount card number from the keyboard (scanner only)». Without the physical card, the discount cannot be applied. For additional security, you can use the «Discount card verification via SMS» option, which will require the customer to provide the code from the message to confirm their identity or write off bonuses.