Ask a Manager: My Employee Fell For A Scam

[minoanmiss]

2. My employee fell for a scam

I run a small retail business and while I was out this afternoon, someone came in and scammed one of my employees into giving him $300 in cash from the register. He told my employee that I was buying some furniture from him and we had spoken about, so she handed him the cash, then realized what she’d done and called me.

How do I proceed from here? I know that confidence tricksters are professionals, but handing over $300 without checking with the boss — I’m good at telling my team when changes are happening and would never ask anyone other than me to pay someone — seems like a big lapse in judgment. That is not an insignificant sum to the business — it’s an average day’s takings.

Any advice on how to handle this with this employee would be appreciated.

The business should cover the expense, just like you would if she made a totally different type of error in her work that cost you money. Absorbing the cost of errors is part of the cost of doing business. You shouldn’t ask an employee to pay for something that happened while they were performing their job in good faith.

But take this as impetus to train all your staff on spotting scams and handling similar situations that could come up in the future.

Comments

[melannen]

Everything else aside, if your response to an employee fucking up, realizing it almost immediately, and then calling the boss to let them know is to fire them for it, then what you will be getting is a bunch of mistakes that happen without you ever knowing about it until they have snowballed into something huge.

The giving up $300 was a lapse in judgement; the calling you right away was both good judgement & evidence that the employee has some loyalty to you. Don't waste those!

[gingicat]

This!

[melannen]

Also since it didn't come up until pretty far down in the ask a manager comments: it may not even be a question of "bad judgement". This sounds like it was a small business with a single low-level employee working alone in the store. I am pretty untrusting in general but if somebody comes in when I don't have backup, tells me that the store owes them money, and doesn't take a couple of firm "no"s for an answer? I'm giving them the money. I may not even realize it's because I was scared until they're gone, but that's going to be a huge factor.

If you're running a store with only one employee on site at a time, you had better be willing to eat a certain amount of loss as a result.

[heavenscalyx]

Just want to chime in to agree with this. One of my relatives is an investment assistant and in 20+ years of working for one of the firms made one (quite small for investments) error (in part because they'd lost a bunch of people and they were doing 3 people's jobs), self-reported, and was not only fired but lost their license despite the affected client asking them not to take any such action because they'd worked with my relative for years. That firm lost an incredibly experienced and loyal employee because of a ridiculous kneejerk, and just taught all the other staffers to never self-report.

[conuly]

Right. ONE mistake is probably nothing to get too worked up about - just, as suggested, invest in better training.