If you ever found yourself at a CVS store in Sudbury, Massachusetts without your coupons, a friendly cashier there would happily apply some coupons to your purchase. She just wouldn’t tell you about it. And then she’d keep the savings for herself instead of giving you the discount. Oh, and the coupons weren’t even real.
That’s what police in the suburban Boston community say 26-year-old Hannah Glazebrook did, to the tune of more than $1,000.
As first reported by Framingham, Massachusetts’ MetroWest Daily News, and later confirmed to Coupons in the News by local police, Glazebrook was arrested on Monday and charged with larceny. She allegedly admitted to ringing up nonexistent coupons over a six-week period, falsely claiming that her customers had used coupons, and then giving the discounts to herself in the form of cash from the register drawer.
Store management naturally became suspicious when the coupon deductions were not accompanied by actual coupons that they could submit for reimbursement.
Their internal investigation determined that the scam had been going on since late January. During each shift, several times per day, Glazebrook allegedly pocketed a small amount of money that she rang up as coupon discounts. Store managers say those small amounts added up to about $1,100, until it ended with Glazebrook’s arrest.
If the charges against her are proven true, Glazebrook would certainly not be the first cashier to have dreamed up this scam – and get caught for it.
There was a rash of similar cases back in 2014. In March of that year, a cashier at a Giant supermarket in Pennsylvania was convicted and sentenced for stealing nearly $10,000 from her store by, in part, entering a whole lot of “missed coupons”. After her customers would leave, she’d enter a series of coupon deductions, as though her customers had forgetfully presented their coupons after paying for their purchases. Then she’d keep the cash for herself. And to cover her tracks, she did the same at other employees’ registers, so she wouldn’t be the only one with all of those missed coupons.
In September 2014, a Winn-Dixie cashier in Florida caused double the damage, netting $20,000 by ringing up coupons that customers never actually used. She was tripped up when managers noticed that she was doing it so often, the value of the coupons exceeded the total value of all of the groceries she sold.
And in December of that year, a Walmart employee in Texas managed to make more than $70,000 from nonexistent coupons, before she was caught. Her job was to count all of the money from all of the registers at the end of the day. But for a year and a half, she inflated the value of coupons that each cashier collected, by $100 – and then pocketed a hundred dollar bill each time.
Glazebrook’s alleged thousand-dollar haul is somewhat paltry in comparison. So she can take some solace in the knowledge that even her three predecessors who were convicted of stealing more, all managed to avoid jail time. But all ended up looking for new jobs – hopefully at a place that doesn’t take coupons.
