Barmen in swipe scam

TWO barmen, Nqobizitha Tshuma and Thomas Junior Chaka who work at popular chill-out spot Hartsfield Tshisanyama have been arrested for allegedly defrauding the company of nearly $1 500 in a scam that used point of sale (POS) machines .

Tshuma, who worked at the main bar and Chaka, who worked at the junior bar under the tent are said to have pocketed the money from January 11 to February 5.

Bulawayo police spokesperson Inspector Precious Simango said:

"We've arrested two suspects in connection with a fraud case involving $1 455 at Hartsfield.  Investigations are underway. We appeal to businesses that might be experiencing such challenges to get in touch with our Commercial Crimes Unit in Bulawayo at the CID Fraud department."

The scam they were using is called a Post Void which is a transaction which cancels, or deletes entirely, a previously completed transaction.

Proprietor of the joint Mduduzi Mdlongwa believes the figure could be more if they consider that they started to use the machine in April last year.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg if you look at the amount of business we had during December when we were open every day and also during the Black

Motion gig and New Year's Eve. My estimate is $11 000, but it could be more," said Mdlongwa.

"Also some of the transactions as we are digging deeper the guys might have been selling money using the cash-back facility. They confessed to the police and we've told them that they should pay us our money back, that's all we want as a business."

Resident DJ Ras Obido discovered the fraud on Wednesday.

"We only got to discover this because for some reason Steward Bank did their updates a bit late and because of the quantity of POS cash back transactions the barmen had done it ballooned the amount ($2 100) that resulted in our bank balance going to a negative (minus $300). So upon inquiry we were told that there had been a number of rollbacks that had been done so the bank was simply claiming what was theirs," said Ras Obido.

Explaining how the syndicate worked Ras Obido said: "When a patron swipes on the POS machine there is the Sale Option which is meant to be used when processing a payment but the guys opted to use option two which is for the Cash Back option. Now this option will require you to swipe the card of the customer then prompt them for the PIN of the customer (which is then done by the customer) and after confirming the PIN a merchant copy is printed. It then asks for customer ID verification after verifying the user confirms whether the customer is the owner of the card or not. The users instead of confirming the identity of the customer would in turn deny the identity of the customer which results in a transaction roll back, meaning money that had originally been transferred to the company's account will be put back to the customer's account.

The users (barmen) would then not issue the cardholder copy but in turn give the shop manager the merchant copy yet no transaction would have been done, which would be used to balance the books."

He said the money could have been either stolen from the cash register or they were working in cahoots with customers.

"As to how they got their money there are a couple of options. The first one is that they might have been conspiring with certain customers to sell stock at half the price get the amount into the pockets and the customer gets the commodity at half the price and the company gets nothing.

"They could simply charge the customer the full price, but since there was a transaction roll back the customer would get the commodity for free and the bar man simply takes solid cash from the cash drawer. But since he has the merchant copy the manager's books would always balance. But there won't be any money in the company's electronic account.

We hadn't noticed this since the differences we always had between bank and receipts were small because of the constant daily account updating that is done by Steward Bank daily."