Thievery and retribution in the electronic age

  • Greg got robbed on Wednes­day. Within 20 min­utes, the thief had spent about $500 of our money. By Fri­day morn­ing, the thief was appre­hended, our money was returned and pun­ish­ment was doled out. The thief never met us, and we never met the thief. Sound like one of those lat­eral think­ing rid­dles? Nope, just the way life is these days in the face­less time of com­put­ers, cam­eras and online banking.

    Here’s what hap­pened. Greg was out of state on busi­ness on Wednes­day after­noon and dropped into a mini-mart for a snack on his way back to the air­port. When he had dri­ven on for a while, he real­ized that he had left his wal­let back at the store and that he wasn’t going to have time to dou­ble back and retrieve it. He called the mini-mart with pre­cise instruc­tions where he’d left it, but they said it wasn’t there. Greg has been through things like this before and doesn’t mon­key around with lost cards — he called me and told me to call and have the debit card and another credit card shut off.

    For those of you who have never been through this, there’s two things you need to know:

    1. You’ve got 24-hour access, and the cards get shut off in an instant. If the US Post Office could act as quickly as a major finan­cial insti­tu­tion that detects fraud, you’d get your mail in 45 min­utes rather than two days.
    2. They’ll rec­om­pen­sate you for the loss. I’m always sur­prised that they’ll just take your word for it, but they do. So we were never wor­ried that we would lose the money permanently.

    All the same, when I went to the bank online to get the phone num­ber, I checked our account activ­ity, and there it was: A $7.92 with­drawal (Greg’s snack), fol­lowed by a $31 charge, a $100 charge and a $211 charge, all within the same mini-mart.

    I’ve never been robbed in per­son — thank God — but I’ve heard peo­ple say that the feel­ings of vio­la­tion are the hard­est part to recover from. In this case, with the rob­bery occur­ring in this anony­mous way, I felt only a muted ver­sion of the same thing. I think I just sat there look­ing at those num­bers for a minute. Here’s a per­son that doesn’t know us, doesn’t know any­thing about us, doesn’t know what we can afford and what strug­gles we have, and yet is will­ing to deal us this kind of blow — nearly $350. Do they know how many times in our mar­ried lives Greg and I had the house­hold in vir­tual lock­down for want of $350 or less?

    The answer is no, of course. You can’t take it per­son­ally; things like this are com­pletely imper­sonal crimes. But that’s why they seem even more insult­ing somehow.

    And I was also left to pon­der the weird­ness of the behav­ior. After I shut off the debit card, I called the credit card — $12.95, spent at the same mini-mart. When Greg shut off the other card, there was a $108 charge at the same mini-mart. This per­son spent almost $475 at the same mini-mart. Holy flip­pin’ cow. What kind of Slurpees do they sell there, the ones that come in a bath­tub? Did they clean out all the Ding Dongs and Chili Fritos? Who the heck decides to go on a spree with stolen credit cards and never leaves the mini-mart?

    The answer didn’t come to me until the next morn­ing. Of course. Some­one who works there, because they can’t leave. By the time they could’ve left and gone some­place where they could spend real money, the cards had been turned off. Greg hadn’t thought of it yet, but once I men­tioned it, it was so obvi­ous that he called the mini-mart.

    And he didn’t have to lay out very much of the story before they got the pic­ture com­pletely. It prob­a­bly helped that Greg wasn’t irate or demand­ing his money back. (By the way, Greg is unfail­ing — almost unnat­u­rally — calm and charm­ing at times like that, and you would not believe how help­ful every­one is. That’s the rea­son he always makes these calls. I quickly dis­in­te­grate into bab­bling, fuss­ing and being enraged, and peo­ple can’t wait to get me off the phone.)

    So they were good enough to call us back with the end of the story yes­ter­day. It didn’t take long to fig­ure out who had done it. It was never really a very smart crime, prob­a­bly just some­thing that seemed like a golden oppor­tu­nity to some­one who was a bit fuzzy on the whole “Thou shalt not steal” thing. Once they sat her down in the lit­tle room, showed her the tally of charges rung up on that card and con­trasted that with some per­ti­nent facts — the $100 charge was for gift cer­tifi­cates, which she had been so inju­di­cious as to flaunt the next day — AND capped it off with the store video show­ing her pick­ing up the wal­let … well­lll, you could be a stu­pid thief, but you’d have to have an IQ in the low twen­ties not to know that the jig was up.

    She was fired, of course. The thing that I didn’t expect was that they also pros­e­cuted the mat­ter with the police. I feel kind of bad about that, see­ing that we weren’t out the money, but then I real­ized that the store really had to do that. Whether the $475 was gone or not, an employee of theirs stole from a cus­tomer. It’s their issue as much as it is ours.

    So there it is: the big cap­per at the end of our rob­bery, and we wouldn’t know this per­son if we passed her in the street tomor­row (though we’re not likely to. She lives in another state.) She might know Greg, if she had both­ered to look at his driver’s license, but I imag­ine she prob­a­bly didn’t. I would think it would be eas­ier to rob from him if he was face­less. And maybe it’s eas­ier for me to feel some grim sat­is­fac­tion because she’s face­less. I’d like to think that it’s all for the best, that whether it was just a momen­tary lapse or another in a series of bad deci­sions, this pec­ca­dillo will have a bet­ter last­ing effect on her ulti­mately because she got caught.

    But we’ll never know. She robbed from us, we got her fired, and we don’t even know each other.

    What a world.


    Related posts:

    1. Trav­el­ing
    2. Life as it should be

    February 3rd, 2007 | Grace | 6 Comments |

6 Responses and Counting...

  • Greg 02.03.2007

    Well told! How­ever, it wasn’t rob­bery — that’s the act of grab­bing a big stick, a gun, a Twinkie or what­ever and say­ing “gim­mie your stuff or I’ll pop a Twinkie in your *ss!”

    If I had to guess, the perp in this case will be brought up on charges of credit card fraud. After all, she didn’t really steal from me — she just found a wal­let. What she did *after* she found the wal­let is what’s relevant.

  • Deb

    You did not “get her fired”. She got her­self fired. I’d feel guilty too, but she did what she did. Now she’s out of a reg­u­larly pay­ing job… hope the tub of Slurpees and Twinkies was worth it.

    I was robbed in Flo­rence. Not face to face, but pretty close (steal­ing my bag from around the chair I was sit­ting on). Saw the guy out of the cor­ner of my eye but dummy me — didn’t even THINK some­thing was amiss. (those trust­ing Amer­i­cans). Took the cash we had just taken out of the ATM and my cards (oh and our new video cam­era). Lovely. With 6 kids in tow it was not pretty, but we man­aged to come through. Def­i­nitely felt vio­lated and was overly para­noid about all our wal­lets, bags, etc. in crowded places for the rest of the trip.

    I’m glad for you guys that the recov­ery was rel­a­tively painless.

    Deb

  • Grace

    Wow, that puts it in per­spec­tive. Of course our lit­tle elec­tronic mis­de­meanor isn’t in the same cat­e­gory. Boy, I’d be para­noid too. And very, very angry.

  • s-p

    Interesting…I had a crack addict employee who stole 3 checks out of the back of my check­book when I left the office to go to the bath­room while he was con­fess­ing his sins to me for 3 hours. He knew enough to do that so I wouldn’t miss the checks in order. He wrote about 2000.00 in bogus checks, the sig­na­tures were so obvi­ously forged, his name was on the back, his ID num­bers etc., AND he went to the bank and con­fessed, but because the teller could not ID him in a lineup as the perp, he got off with­out being charged. Its enough to resort to vigilante-ism.

  • Grace

    All right, now I’m get­ting really mad and con­fused. His NAME was on the checks, he went to the bank and CONFESSED … and they still needed some­thing else??? That just sounds ridiculous.

  • s-p

    Yep. Ridicu­lous was not the word that I used. The DA said not enough evi­dence to con­vict if he recinded his “con­fes­sion” to the bank… which he would prob­a­bly do since he was a meth head. You DO know what the dif­fer­ence between a meth addict and an alchoholic is? An alchoholic will steal from you then come and apol­o­gize and promise to make amends. A meth head will steal from you then come and promise to help you find the MF who stole your stuff. That is for real.

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