This one’s pretty crafty — a provision store owner with his own barcode label printer produced his own stickers and slapped them on items in supermarkets.
The result? Items scanned and paid for at the lowered price of his own choosing. Staff were none the wiser because he would utilise the self-checkout counters. You gotta admit, it’s an artful con.
27-year-old Zhang Bobo eventually got caught and has since been sentenced to six months in jail for cheating, The Straits Times reports. In total he got away with saving $4,282 for himself, of which he has made full restitution to Cold Storage and Giant supermarkets.
During a period of financial problems some time in August last year, Zhang hatched a scheme to make money after observing self-checkout counters at various supermarkets. He planned to purchase tins of milk powder at drastically cheaper prices from the supermarkets and re-sell them at his own store.
After printing low-priced barcode stickers on his store’s label printer, he would head down to supermarkets and get to work. At Giant Tampines last November, he pasted the false price tags on six milk powder tins, a cooker and a vacuum cleaner. They all registered as Marigold evaporated milk at $1.25 each on the scanner, and he paid for the total of $10 easily, instead of the actual amount of $630.
The milk powder was sold online to make up for losses he reportedly suffered running his provision shop business.
Over the following days, he would continue to carry out similar cons in other supermarkets, cheating another Giant outlet out of $1,190 and back again at Giant Tampines out of $547.
He was finally caught at Cold Storage’s Eastwood Road outlet on Nov 5 when he tried to cheat again by paying $6 for three tins of milk powder worth $493.
In court, it was revealed that the shop Zhang had been running was financed by his father, who was pressuring him to return his debts. He was allowed to defer his sentence until April 27 to give him some time to sell the shop.
