Or think about this. A man walks into your shop with a pair of jeans and a receipt. He shows you some defects in the jeans. You have no choice. You have to refund the money to the man and throw the piece of clothing away. Then you find out that the receipt is a fraudulent one.

Or worst case. Your employees just make a return entry of existing stock from display rack and pocket the money.

In either case, you lose money.

These instances are called sales return fraud. There are various other ways of swindling your business for money.

Now, if you are using a point of sale (POS) software, you can use it to prevent these losses from occurring. Here’s a look at how you can make your POS software and ally in sales return fraud prevention.

POS software will help you track your return statistics

You can be sure of return fraud occurring by checking a few things:

• Sudden increase in the return rate
• More number of returned items have to be discarded
• The number of items returned that can be resold has gone down

POS software features can easily track down this information. Additionally, you can stop store employees from committing this crime.

POS software enables you to print digital signatures

Another cause of return fraud is when stolen merchandise is returned for cash or gift coupons. If you have digital receipts, the returned item can be verified. If there is no such receipt, then you are sure to have a thief on your hands.

It is easy to train the staff to use the POS software to check for digital receipts. This would allow you to have less strict return policies. Customers would remain happy.

Posting notes against customers in the POS software

The POS software can display special notes or reminders about customers. Now, if you have a customer who is a habitual returnee, you can always check the items returned closely and follow return policies.

Using a “Exchange module” of POS software to counter fraudulent return

In apparel retail store, it is common that customer comes back asking for changing this size to that size or changing this color for that. POS software can be programmed where it can scan the item to exchange AND then scan the new item. This will help you know what's going on. And this will also help the cashier to handle the case. 

So, if you have a retail store business and you are constantly disturbed about sales return frauds, stop worrying. Make your POS software an ally and you can sleep peacefully knowing that your business is safe.