are easily distracted. Otherwise, they avoided mornings because that's when clerks and other store employees are most alert. The Vickers Gang would do its shopping in the afternoon, after the clerks have been there for four or five hours. By then, everyone is worn out. Cashiers just want to get you out of there, because they're ready to go out on a date or pick up their kids, and they just want the last two or three hours at the store to end.
They were told never to return something in Minneapolis with a receipt they got in Chicago. Clerks get confused with out-of-state receipts, because the chains often have different style receipts in different states. They won't recognize them and will then call the manager. You never want the manager to get involved. Another rule was not to return something with a receipt dated thirty minutes ago to a store an hour away. Also, they were forbidden to return the same type of item twice to the same store. If you bring back pots and pans one day, don't return pots and pans next week. You can bring in a jacket or a microwave, but not the same thing. There's always the risk that the store will have figured out the pots and pan return after you left.
Determined to stop the Vickers Gang, Target was fastidious about incorporating fresh security features into their receipts. But when company officials go to sleep at night, criminals stay up late working on new ways to beat the system. The genius about Santa Claus and the Vickers Gang was their ability to adapt. Within days of a retail chain making alterations in its systems, they would make the appropriate changes in their operations. After all, when they began, there were no UPC codes, just ordinary price stickers. So they counterfeited the price stickers. Stores had manual cash registers. So the Vickers drove around with an NCR cash register in their trunk, and would make their counterfeit receipts on the register. When clerks looked at a receipt when he was returning something, Santa Claus would sometimes joke, "If you don't like that receipt, I can just get another one from my trunk." When stores moved to computers, they followed suit. At one point, Target switched to a restricted cash register ribbon that printed in two colors of ink, so that the top half of a number might be black and the bottom half red. The Vickers Gang tried unsuccessfully to buy one of the ribbons, and finally managed to steal one.
The Vickers Gang had a long and prosperous run, and some narrow escapes. Sensing she was being watched, Jodi Vickers once had to peel off a bunch of labels she stuck on some pots and pans and chew them up. Both she and her husband got caught in a Kmart but were let off with probation. But the work of Target investigators and law enforcement agents finally succeeded in catching Santa Claus and his gang in Florida in the mid-1990s, and he was sent to prison. He never paid any restitution. While he was in jail, Target became one of the few chains to switch to line-item detail on its receipts, which is what I strongly recommend. When you bring something back to Target now, the computer in the store will not only read the header but also search for that particular item and see that it matches the purchase record in the computer's data base.
Jodi Vickers agreed to cooperate with prosecutors and received probation. The last I heard, she was remarried, working for the Florida Motor Vehicle Department, of all places, and writing cookbooks for people with gout. Toward the end of 2000, Santa Claus was released from jail. His feet were in bad shape from gangrene, but Target and other retailers put their stores on alert that he was once again a free man. Even at this late date, no one is willing to bet that he is planning to go straight.
THE JOYS OF TRAVEL
Traveler's checks are another favorite document for criminals to counterfeit, because they can be readily converted into cash. Traveler's checks are pretty secure. The problem is not enough people who take them know how to recognize the security features, even though it's not hard, since there are only four brands of traveler's checks in the world to remember.
The first thing to know is that all traveler's checks begin with the routing number, 8000. This is the number assigned to