Don't hustle a hustler

There's a good amount of friendly people who visit the store that you look forward to talking to and you form relationships with. But life being what it is, there has to be negative elements to balance out the positive ones. That would be the SCAMMERS. These are the desperate people who think they've come up with some brilliant idea that the game industry people have never seen before to get one over on us and wind up with more cash. I'd rather you just shoplift something from the stop than try to outsmart us, really, it insults our intelligence. Here's my top three from least creative to criminal mastermind:

1) The empty box - This one's so simple a child could do it. Buy a game, then bring it back the next day and say there was no disc in it. Note this usually applies only to used games, however I did have sometime attempt it with a factory sealed game. My BS meter was going off the scale, but I did open up a sealed copy of the same title, and that one WAS missing a disc. So looks like the distributor scammed us that time........but 98% of the time, the mysterious vanishing disc just doesn't work.

2) Selling a dead console - We always check consoles before buying them, because it'd be really stupid not to. Someone was attempting to sell an X-Box, so I hooked it up and the first game wouldn't load.......so I try another........no luck......third strike you're out, so this guy had a dead system. "It worked at home five minutes ago......", that's the one they always come back with. Well, I'm gonna pay you via a check, and when it bounces my reply will be "there was enough cash in the account to cover it five minutes ago.....". I gave a description of the guy to the boss, and it turns out he was in just yesterday trying to sell the same console to a different staff memeber. Nice try Ocean's Eleven, next time have George Clooney do some more recon work first.

3) There's a demo PS2 running in the store, and at the time we had Need For Speed Underground playing. A guy comes in with a NFSU box, and says the disc is missing (this is a variation of scam #1). He says it must be the one in the demo set, and we forgot to give it to him. So I check the receipt first, and it lists a NFS game, but since there are about 100 versions of that game, it's not the Underground one listed, it's Hot Pursuit or something. DING, my scammer sense is tingling. "Check the demo set, man, just give me the disc from there, you guys must have forgot....". Lemme tell you the feeling I had next was close to an orgazism when I got to tell the guy "THE PS2 DEMO SET HAS A HARD DRIVE AND THE GAMES RUN FROM THAT!" This guy just got PWNED! and just walked out of the store.

Score:
Postman: 3
Wanna be criminals: 0