Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Many of the details are not clear. If he did try and return the watch, what happened? Given that police found the watch at his home, it seems as though his effort to return the watch—assuming it happened—was not successful. And why would he dispose of that receipt if it corroborated his version of events? And why didn’t he cancel at once the receipt that revealed the problem?

Police charged the associate with grand larceny in the fourth degree and falsifying business records in the first degree.

Fraudsters love change and experimentation. Attacking before the bugs of a new system are worked out, and when no one yet knows what “normal” looks like, is a popular approach.

With mobile-payment and additional merged-channel efforts expected to soar in frequency over the next 12 months, retailers need to be extra-paranoid about these newly created security holes. The customer convenience of having transaction and CRM records moving seamlessly from in-store to online to mobile to social to call center is a wonderful thing, but it will also create petabytes of new cracks for fraudulent transactions to hide.

There is an IT tendency to cut back on security precautions for trials, because the costs are difficult to justify for a technology that may never be fully deployed and that is only being used at a few stores for a very limited period of time. In a sense, the limited trial is limiting the exposure. But to a fraudster, those not-yet-secure experiments are golden opportunities.

One chain recently learned of some security holes within a mobile trial. It opted to let the holes remain due to a simple ROI calculation. Given the small number of people who would likely try the experiment and the statistically small percentage of them who would like try to defraud the system, the chain calculated the likely costs of such fraud and compared it to the likely cost of fixing the holes. It opted to leave the holes, with a plan to fix them if the technology was ultimately approved for chain-wide deployment.

That’s perfectly reasonable CFO thinking. But knowing that fraudsters bank on such thinking, it may be time to focus more on paranoia and less on strict ROI. The Macy’s associate was caught primarily because of greed and a lack of subtlety. The next attacks are likely to be much more nuanced.