What is the biggest fuck up youve witnessed at work?

I work in retail so we get a lot of people trying to use stolen credit cards/debit cards.

I live in the UK so there are two methods of paying with a credit/debit card.

  1. chip and pin - the card has an electronic chip in it and you have to type in a personal identification number to approve the purchase.

  2. contactless payment - you tap the card against the reader and it takes for the purchase, no identification needed (but it limits you to a £20 purchase).

  3. on extremely rare occasions you can sign for it, the only time that ever happens is if the card clearly doesn't have a chip in and 9 times out 10 that means your not British if thats the case (sometimes brits work for international companies/live abroad and have a company card).

Now everyone gets caught by the contactless system, its impossible to tell its stolen from the assistants point of view, hell most of the time we don't even see the card.

It might get rejected meaning we force you to type in the PIN, if you don't theres a good chance you stole the card (obviously there are exceptions, apple pay isn't reliable also you might not have enough money in your account or you reached your contactless limit)

If your card has a chip but you insist on swiping it you're probably committing credit card fraud so we wont serve you.

If we have to type in stuff like the expiration date and the card number then that's a massive warning sign that the card doesnt belong to you.

Which brings me to the idiot who shall not be named.

IWSNBN works in a small store where your on your own for about 6 hours, its very quite you usually serve a customer every 10 minutes and if you need help you can call the main store and someone will come down to help you out.

IWSNBN has a teenager come into the store to buy cigarettes, our prices are notoriously bad as in whatever you pay normally add £3 to it and thats what we charge.

Most of our days are spent informing customers of this then getting shouted at like its our fault and not the company.

Whatever its the job.

But this teenager is totally fine with the price in fact he buys like 2 packets (so about £20 worth of cigs) with a debit card using contactless.

He goes away and his mate comes in and does the same WITH THE SAME CARD.

These keeps happening over and over again with 4 or 5 different kids all buying cigarettes using the same card.

Then the card locks up, theres a limit on how many transactions you can do with contactless to prevent too much money being stolen.

So they demand she type in the details which as I mentioned before is a no no.

So she types in the details and she does it over and over again.

But she never calls the manager for help, she doesn't shut the store (theres a shutter she can pull down and lock) and she doesn't call the police, we have an emergency button she can press and were in a train station that has a police station inside of it, if she pressed the button an officer would be with her within a minute.

IWSNBN doe none of this, she just carries on serving them.

She says she knew what they were doing but she was so scared she just let them get away with it.

They eventually leave when they've practically wiped out the cigarette counter.

In the space of TWO HOURS she's lots £8000 worth of stock.

By far the biggest fuck up I've ever seen.


tl:dr girl sells £8000 worth of cigarettes to a gang of teenagers who are using stolen credit cards/card to make the purchase despite the fact that she knew what was happening and had ways to prevent it.

/r/AskReddit Thread