Precious YSL

No, I'm not doing the self lauding thing.. It was a reference to (Mma) Precious Ramotswe, heroine of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books by Alexander MacCall Smith - My favourite series of books. The new book was published last week and I'm deliberately rationing myself in reading it because I know that I will enjoy it and will only be disappointed when it ends. I'm on Chapter 4 already and have had to stop myself a few times from carrying on reading. But I digress slightly, the reason I referred to myself as Precious YSL was because I had to play detective at work today.

Every now and again, my job requires me to figure out what's happened when a transaction goes wrong and more importantly, how to correct it. There times when I hate investigations because I may have to investigate a case of theft which means I have to find evidence to support the theory - Even if it's someone I know and work with. However, it also appeals to the problem solving part of me. Recently, we've had a new report which shows all refunds onto electronic gift cards. Cutting a long story short, I noticed how this one gift card's number kept cropping up. Over 2 days, there were 4 transactions where there were refunds onto this card. I'm getting a bit suspicious, so I decide to investigate the matter a bit further and see if the car was used to buy anything too. Yes it was. But here's what set the alarm bells ringing:

On Friday, the person got a refund of £17.99 onto the card to make the balance £104.62. Now it's suspicious enough that anyone would have a card balance of over £100 anyway, but 7 mins later at 11:10, they buy a DVD for £5.99 making the closing balance £98.63. The next transaction I have is at 14:27 where they've had a refund of £15.99. However, the opening balance of the gift card isn't £98.63, it's £165.69. They've had £67.06 added to their card. So with this new refund, the closing balance on this card is now £181.68 - Nearly £90 more in one day!

I phone up customer services and she obviously doesn't really know what I'm on about. So I offer to get some more info from the other two stores and then email her. Well, it turns out that this customer has been to all 3 stores and getting refunds onto the card. The missing £67.06 between 11:10 and 14:27 were from the other two stores. But more puzzling, there were instances where the same DVD was returned TWICE to the same store. Also, they would buy a DVD from the top floor of one store, walk down the stairs to the ground floor and then immediately get a refund back onto the card. Anyway, I get the email off to customer services and let them deal with it all.

Nearly 2 hours later, I get a reply from Customer Services praising me on my detective work. It is indeed a serial fraudulent abuser of the refund/exchange policy, so they've gone and blocked the card and were about to issue a warning email to the other stores telling them of their exploits. Looking at the report, bearing in mind they only seem to appear for 2 days in the week at a time, they've accumulated over £340 of refunds onto the gift card in 2 months. Customer Services even joked and said: "Good work Sherlock!" I have to say that I felt really proud at myself. Not only was the work great fun, it was enormously satisfying to know that of all 3 stores in the centre - I was the only one to notice it.

I'm feeling ridiculously proud right now :)