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'Forced Sale' Credit Card Trick Nets $2K In Clothes From Andersonville Shop

By Josh McGhee | July 11, 2017 12:24pm
 Turley Road boutique at 5239 N. Clark Street.
Turley Road boutique at 5239 N. Clark Street.
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DNAinfo/Josh McGhee

ANDERSONVILLE — A woman walked away with $2,000 worth of merchandise from an Andersonville business with a "forced sale" credit card trick, and the owners are hoping neighbors will help them catch the culprit.

Thursday afternoon, the woman, who looked to be in her early 20s with light hair, walked into Turley Road, 5239 N. Clark St., and used what employees believe is a credit card scam to purchase several items from the store. And now at least one other store believes it was victimized by the woman.

"It's rare for a girl of that age to have purchased so much without blinking an eye, but we really don't make judgments here. We don't really think that way unless we're forced to," said Sarah Mergener, the employee who rang up the items last week.

A police report was filed for the incident at the boutique and there is currently an open investigation, said Sgt. Michael Malinowski, although he said said incidents like these can be "hard to prove" particularly without surveillance photos.

Turley Road has given copies of security photos from the incident to police and placed them in the window of the store, hoping to put the other boutiques in the neighborhood on the look out.

The woman entered the shop around 2 p.m. Thursday and was "very quiet, but sweet," said Mergener.

"She told me she was a model and was trying to get pieces for an interview. She tried on a few things pretty quickly and brought a bunch of stuff" up to the counter and even asked employees to gift wrap an item as a present to a friend, Mergener said.

When she got to the register, she gave Mergener a copy of what appeared to be a drivers license.

The woman presented her ID "before I asked," Mergener said, and told the store since she was traveling she was having trouble with her bank. She told them her bank had given her a code to avoid "a hold."

The woman then typed a code into the credit card machine, which Mergener now believes resulted in the machine going "offline." Mergener said she wasn't suspicious because the credit card, in the end, was not declined.

"Part of me was a little questioning, but if the card would've been declined" it would've raised red flags, she said.

The store didn't realize the sale was fraudulent until her boss settled the registers at the end of the day and realized the sale never went through.

The crime was tough for a small business to absorb, Mergener said, particularly since the total amount was similar to what a small shop might sell in a day or a couple of days.

Turley Road posted a recap of the incident online along with the woman's picture.

Lisa Piemonte, who has run the Lazy Dog Antique Store for 13 years, saw the post and believes the same woman ran a "forced sale" scam at their store in January, she said.

The loophole has allowed scammers to override declined credit or debit cards and run up expensive bills at major retailers including Apple, Victoria's Secret, Banana Republic and Wet Seal, over the last several years.

A "forced sale" transaction is ordinarily used by merchants when a card is declined. Typically, the merchant would receive an authorization code from the bank or credit card company, which the merchant types into the credit card terminal overriding the rejection. At a later date, the merchant and card issuer will settle the debt, according to the States Attorney's Office in New Jersey.

"For technical reasons relating to the forced sale process, it does not actually matter what code the merchant types into the terminal. Any combination of digits will override the denial. So long as the customer provides a fake authorization code and convinces the merchant to enter it into the terminal, the transaction will go through. The merchant is unlikely to discover the fraud until days or weeks later," the office explained in a press release for a 2014 case.

On Jan. 16, the same woman entered the antique store at 1903 W. Belmont Ave. with "a short guy with a beard" and started asking if the store had a real "Fabregè egg," which has a high retail value. When they told her they did not, she set her sites on other high-priced items in the store, said Jennifer Bell, who rang up the items in the incident.

"I think she was trying to plant the seed that she had money," she said, adding the woman then asked if they had any "estate jewelry," a term that usually means real gold jewelry.

The woman signed the guest book with a Florida contact information and said she was in town looking for a gift for her sister, before ringing up a tab of about $3,500 of their "best pieces," which she asked for a deal on, Bell said, adding "a normal customer would ask for a discount."

The jewelry included a gold citrine ring, a white gold amethyst ring and Tiffany & Company rose gold ring and a matching necklace also from Tiffany, she said.

"She told me the transaction would be declined. ... She told me what would happen," Bell said.

The woman continued to give instructions resembling a "forced sale" and entered a pin code. The store didn't realize the sale was fraudulent until Feb. 1 — and by then security camera footage had been deleted.

The credit card company "was basically like, 'Sorry, there is nothing we can do,'" she said. "They took the money back and basically said they never did this."

Bell had taken a photocopy of her license, a precaution she takes for all big sales. The license said the woman was 23, from Utah, 5-foot-8 and 125 pounds. The similar appearance in the photos and possible connection to the Turley Road incident has given the store new hope for closure as other store owners have reported similar stories, she said.

"We were heartbroken. ... They were some of our best pieces," Bell said.