Staff theft is costing the UK retail industry £3.3 billion a year. To tackle this growing problem many retailers have invested in EPOS transaction analysis software to help identify suspicious behaviour such as ‘sweet hearting’ and ‘non-existent refunds’. However, the problem is that without hard evidence, it is too costly to investigate every single incident.

The solution is an EPOS-CCTV link which allows each suspicious transaction to be displayed with its corresponding video side-by-side at the click of a mouse. This makes it easy for the loss prevention team to discount the thousands of false alarms which, after closer inspection, are not in fact fraudulent incidents taking place; conversely, attention and resources can now focus in on the real culprits i.e. those revealed to be committing a crime. By making it quick and easy to ‘mine’ the vast amount of visual data held in the CCTV system, the final, visual proof that events have actually occurred in a certain way can now be added to other forms of evidence – including EPOS transactional data - to build a complete picture. Retailers can now compile hard evidence, either to highlight guilty members of staff, or identify individual criminals or gangs working in the area.