Restaurant frauds are not a rare phenomenon in the restaurant and foodservice industry. Reports and researches conducted on this issue clearly state that restaurant or hotel industry fraud are conducted by both the employees and customers. In this paper I will give an account of two frauds conducted by employees and guests.
Story of an Employee’s Fraud:
One of the most worst restaurant fraud case that I have ever heard was the Credit-Card fraud conducted by two Servers in a Applebee’s neighborhood Grill & Bar restaurant in Jupiter, Florida four years ago. According to the investigating officers of the Jupiter police the two servers work working in collusion and one of them takes the credit card of the customer to swipe it to charge the customer’s meal and then he/she would again swipe the card in a credit card scanning device which saves the information of the credit card while the other accomplice would be covering him/her from seeing others. In this way they have stolen the information of at least 100 or more credit cards.
One of the servers was caught red-handed and the scanning device was found in his pocket. He soon admitted in front of the authorities of swiping the credit cards and then selling the information to a third person for $30 per card.
Both the servers were held in the Palm Beach County jail facing federal charges and as far as I know police was looking after the third person who have been buying information of the credit cards with these two servers. (WPBF, 2004)
Story of a Customer’s/Guest’s Fraud:
The worst guest’s fraud which I have personally witnessed occurred when We attended a wedding ceremony in Sheraton’s banquet hall. When the meal was served I saw a group of teenagers who were acting strangely. Despite sitting and eating there meals they were aimlessly wandering around different tables and chatting with people as they were their friends or close relative as they knew them. Nobody paid attention to them nor thought their
activity as suspicious as they were considered as guest children merely chatting and gossiping with friends and relatives.I had been wondering through out the ceremony about the strange behavior of the kids and in a couple of days the mystery of their strange behavior was disclosed. One of my cousins was also present at the wedding and later he told me that the parents of a kid caught him with the hotel’s silverware and other utensils. After a little bit of questioning and scolding the kid finally accepted that he and some of his friends and cousins when saw the silverware they thought that they can easily take it out and get some extra money by selling it in the downtown. The parents called the parents of other kids and all the stolen silverware was then found out.
The parents thought it that it will be too much an embarrassment to send the items back to the hotel with an apology so they took the silverware from the kids and punished them. The most interesting thing was the creativeness of the theft that how did they took the thinks out of the hotel despite all the security and cameras everywhere. They did proper covering from the security and cameras and none of the security cameras probably showed them stealing. This is probably because they seemed too much inspired by some action movies in which these security-avoiding techniques are displayed.
References
WPBF (2004) Restaurant Servers Charged In Alleged Credit-Card Fraud.