Self service supermarkets are the new trend in many urban areas but they often lead to illegal activities as there is no one to monitor and the buyer does not have to interact with another human responsible at the store. A French teenager has been jailed after he fooled a supermarket self-service checkout while charging him just €9 for a PlayStation 4. The 19 year old boy, by the French media has been identified as Adel.
Adel had taken the games console off the shelves at a supermarket in Montbeliard, eastern France in September, 2018. The teenager weighed it as if it was a 6lb fruit then put the sticker with that low price on the machine and ran it through a self-service checkout station. Reports say that Adel later sold the PlayStation for €100 so that he could afford a train ticket to his home town of Nice. The teenager was caught because he had returned to the store the next day and attempted to pull the same trick again.
Adel has been sentenced to four months in prison at a magistrates court in Montbeliard but he had not appeared in person for the hearing. A PlayStation 4 usually retails for £250 for a standard 500 GB machine with one game can go up to £350 for the 1TB PlayStation Pro model.
Talking about a 2016 report by the University of Leicester, it suggested that the self-service checkouts in the shops generate a significantly high rates of loss and created an environment that encouraged theft as any potential scammer does not have the need to interact with another human to notice the alteration in the price. It also stated that the retailers could find themselves accused of making theft easy for people who otherwise would not be tempted to commit a crime. A report by a leading daily had predicted that the number of self service checkouts across the globe would grow by around 240,000 to 468,000 between 2016 and 2021.
Photo Credits: The Week UK
