MSE News: Sainsbury's shopper arrested for coupon fraud

European_Citizen

I can't believe that so many people can be so harsh on this woman without knowing all the facts. OK, based on the info we have what she did was wrong but I think many are over-reacting. I wonder why there is not so much hatred against the supermarkets which try to cheat us all the time. Somehow their misleading offers and overcharging practices are seen as 'mistakes' that can be rectified. I do not call the police every time I discover that I have been charged the full price for a discounted product. Couldn't the matter have been resolved differently, i.e. by contacting the woman and asking her to pay back or whatever?
And before someone argues that what she did was deliberate while the supermarkets' scams are not: mistakes can happen but most things are well-planned.

myalphabetgirls

split_second wrote: »

i used to work in a supermarket and some customers used to boast that some weekly magazines had more in coupons than the cover price, this was when supermarkets would take coupons for anything they sold, so of course the products in question were in every supermarket.

Tesco openly accepted coupons as cash before Oct 2009 with just a few basic rules, they stocked it, the coupon was in date and you only used one of a kind. So did Waitrose and to a degree Asda. Yes, often newspapers and magazines had coupons which exceeded their cost. Isn't that just savvy shopping?

Earlier this year a woman's weekly magazine ran a coupon for a free pot of Onken yogurt which exceeded the cost of the magazine. It was still savvy shopping for me to buy this magazine and get the yogurt for free especially as the coupon scanned for more than it was sold for.

If so many of the posts on this thread are anti-coupon use why would it attract your attention in the first place?

We still only know an edited version of the circumstances.

lisawaters

Disbelief...

My ex-builder conned me out of £25,000. He has seven county court judgements. I heard he had ripped off another woman last week for several thousands. He is protected from having to sell his house to repay debts totalling more than £100,000 that we know of and probably much more. He was named on a BBC1 programme about fraud. He couldn't give a stuff.

The police and trading standards say they can't do anything about him. Yet they can finger a woman's collar for a few coupons.

This is why people are fed up.

anika

If you look at the FTSE100 you will see that 98 out of 100 are ALL down, except 2! Morrisons and Tesco. It would seem that the coupon shoppers are not hurting them TOO much!!

Symnz_2

Breaking TOS is not breaking the law!

What she did, is illegal - Fraud by false representation.
Here is the reason why:
She made a false representation by giving many different names.

If she had just used 'nick-names', she would not have broken any laws, just found a loophole. As for many email addresses? I have over 100 myself... It's no crime, but I have them. Ya never know when groupon has a good offer. *wink*

As for the DTD JTD - that is not illegal. (As long as you have not modified the vouchers).
As long as the vouchers are legit too. (as long as the receipt is still unsigned and you still have it).

The TOS of the price check DO NOT state that you cannot print more than one, I have scanned the site deeply for this.
The vouchers say that they can be used once.

Okay, I have a voucher that says: 1010 1010 1010 1010
I print that 3 times. I can use each of those 3, 3 times. I cannot use those same 3 again. If I print 3 more, they are 3 new vouchers, but the same code. (as long as the receipt is still valid, I am acting lawfully). This is not fraud.

Yes, it may be morally wrong, it's not going to give me any karma boostings...

Tesco have their Entertainment section in the channel islands, so they DO NOT have to pay VAT. This is a loophole. Does that mean they are breaking the law? No, they are taking advantage of a loophole in the government.

Tesco take boots and Asda vouchers.
They are forcing themselves to lose money...but they are breaking the TOS of those vouchers... Are they breaking the law?


If that woman took it to court, Tesco would not have taken any action, nor given the police evidence to help in their investigation. They know of this loophole, and clearly do not care enough.

I have, like many abused the promotion. Do I care? I couldn't care less!

THANKYOU,
Mr Tesco!

jenniewb

Whilst I agree with you in part (Symnz above) two wrongs don't make a right. What should be happening is Cameron getting himself together and taking on the mass corporations, making them pay tax. Just because they think they have a legal loop hole doesn't make it OK morally (as you have said) and if the government is trying to save any real money they'd have an easy route just looking for massive corporations who try to find their own legal loop holes. If Tesco are refused to honor their customers loop holes, maybe the government should follow the trend...

moneysavingkitten

JimmyTheWig wrote: »

In which case you'd have no need to use different printers / change IP addresses, etc.
And you'd have no problem in telling the staff exactly what you were doing when you paid with the coupons.
Then there could be no possibility of fraud as you aren't deceiving anyone.

Is this what you think the woman in question did? Or do you think that she tried to deceive someone?

I don't know if this woman was wrong or just pushing vouchers of their absolute limits. I agreed with mixtrixx that it is presumptuous if it is 'unclear', or maybe they just don't want us to know how it was done?

I don't think it's right to sign up with a million different e-mail addresses to get multiple coupons, but lets take a minute here, some coupons are meant to be used multiple times and some of the things posted here just don't make any sense. Lets not make criminals out of people who are trying to legitimately make the most of their vouchers.

I am certain that if you download a .pdf coupon, you are print it however many times you like *without it being linked to your e-mail or IP address*. Yes you will have probably (not always) entered your e-mail address to get the coupon, but after that, they have absolutely no way of tracking how many times you print it.

The ocassional .pdf voucher has terms on it that say it can only be printed once, but the majority say just say long they must used against the correct product and only used one per transaction. The companies who make these vouchers are well aware if they send a .pdf out it can be used many times, that's why they send them out, to promote their products and get people into the habbit of buying them!

I don't have a clue why you think that changing printers would have any effect on the number of vouchers you can print, that just makes no sense. Most printers don't have IP addresses of their own, so there would be no way of recognising them. If the website is really over engineered they might be able to tell what model of printer it is, but it's hardly worth their bother and I don't see how it would help them. I think when people tell people to try another printer, it's because the voucher won't print in the first place!

Or do you mean going to someone else's house and using their printer? Because if that is the case, then for most vouchers that are one use only, you would have to log back in with your e-mail address again to claim the voucher, so why does that make any difference? If it's a multiple use voucher, who cares anyway? There is nothing wrong with using other printers, if you are still using the same details.

JimmyTheWig

Symnz wrote: »

The TOS of the price check DO NOT state that you cannot print more than one, I have scanned the site deeply for this.
The vouchers say that they can be used once.

I would have thought that a reasonable person would think that the voucher in this instance is the thing on your computer rather than the piece of paper once it is printed. That's what you can only use once. By printing the same voucher twice you are using it twice.

moneysavingkitten wrote: »

I don't have a clue why you think that changing printers would have any effect on the number of vouchers you can print, that just makes no sense. Most printers don't have IP addresses of their own, so there would be no way of recognising them.

I think that this is where the fraud (deception) comes in. Different printers may print things looking slightly differently (e.g. a colour inkjet will look significantly different to a black and white laser). If you print 50 coupons using the same printer then the staff might notice. If you print using different printers then, just by looking at the vouchers, it will look like different people are using them.
I see it, then, as being a tactic used by someone who knows what they are doing is against the rules and are being deceptive to get around it.

kay_depp

Just tried to use a legit coupon for a free jar or marmite, emailed to me by marmite, and was refused in Sainsburys. Told, bluntly, "we don't accept printed coupons, 'cause theres so many scams", When I asked how then I was supposed to get a copy from my computer screen then, without printing it was told, "err we don't accept printed coupouns, contact marmite....."

stewgreen

- So the "people who abuse coupons are doing no harm",
- Well amongst other things it seems they could cause couponing to end or become much more difficult for the rest of us.