Marks & Spencer To Catch Fraudsters At The Till
New Monitoring System Biggest Thing Since CCTV
May 19 2002
Marks & Spencer has implemented a new 30-second fraud detection system which it claims will reduce fraud at the till point by 10 per cent.
The technology works so fast that the perpetrator can be caught in the act.
Till transactions will be monitored by a ‘listening’ system. Suspect transactions are identified by comparing patterns of buyer behaviour and mapping receipts from individual cash registers with centralised information. Once a suspect transaction is identified, an SMS is immediately sent to store security and managers mobile phones. This whole process takes only 30 seconds.
Martin Wilkinson, profit protection manager at Marks & Spencer said: “We serve over 10 million customers a week, and although the vast majority of our customers do pay, there is a very small minority that don’t. There has been an explosion in retail fraud and it is inevitable that as one of the largest UK retailers, we are going to suffer. “This system is the most exciting advance in the detection of retail crime since the arrival of CCTV.”
