Issue 4
Executives at major retailers believe receipted returns guarantee transaction legitimacy.
This assumption can cost them millions.
One veteran asset protection manager spent years confronting this belief—implementing fraud prevention across 2,000+ stores while navigating leadership’s emotional resistance to questioning receipted returns.
But first, your industry brain teaser of the week:
What percentage of retail shrink comes from return fraud?
Scroll to the bottom for the answer.
What's in stock
Here’s what we have in store for you this week:
- The Rundown: Breaking the “receipts equal safe” assumption
- Worth Your Time: 2026 retail shifts and loss prevention priorities
- What We’re Up To: The Takeback Talks, RILA AP, Women in Retail Summit
The Rundown
“You can go on Reddit right now and type in any retailer plus ‘receipted returns,'” a veteran asset protection manager notes. “Within an hour, you’d be a subject matter expert as it relates to how to defraud that place within the receipted world.”
The fraudsters have industrialized their education, while executives still hold the misconception that receipted returns are automatically legitimate transactions. This assumption creates the primary barrier to comprehensive fraud prevention. Leadership believes receipts guarantee transaction legitimacy, while sophisticated fraud methods exploit that exact blind spot. Even when loss data contradicts that belief, the anxiety about customer backlash and declining sales carries more weight.
Retailers recognize the fraud but hesitate to intervene, until they realize that stopping abuse doesn’t damage loyalty or revenue. It defends margin and prevents dishonest behavior from eroding what honest customers deserve.
The AP manager learned that emotional resistance from leadership often stems from isolated customer complaints that executives remember more vividly than comprehensive fraud prevention data.
The customer who emails everyone until they reach the CEO, or the person who takes their grievances to X and swears to never shop there again, these incidents happen, but they’re a drop in the bucket when compared to the total amount of annual returns processed smoothly.
The successful implementation required five distinct phases:
- Regional assessment to account for dramatic variations between markets
- Associate education emphasizing customer service over fraud detection
- Multi-regional pilots with localized approaches
- Executive storytelling using statistical context
- Enterprise rollout with override systems that maintained culture while achieving goals
The AP manager’s playbook details the complete process for implementing enterprise-wide fraud prevention while securing executive trust through data-driven education.
Worth your time
We know time is money, so we won’t waste yours
- Retail trends to watch in 2026 include AI-powered personalization and supply chain resilience (Retail Dive)
- Wegmans deploys facial recognition technology in elevated-risk stores to enhance security (Chain Store Age)
- Store leadership quality is a statistically significant driver of retail loss, and the least-engaged stores lose 48% more than the rest (ECR Loss)
What we're up to
The Takeback Talks kicked off April 15—45 minutes, closed-door, VP+ only. The topic: the $166B problem nobody owns. LP, finance, ops, and CX in the same room, with David Johnston from the NRF LP Council in the conversation.
We were in Phoenix for RILA Asset Protection April 19-22, connecting with retailers in our private meeting room throughout expo hours. We kicked things off Sunday evening at Carry On—a first-class vintage airline cabin with craft cocktails and a simulated flight from New York to Tokyo. Small group, great room.
We closed out the month at the Women in Retail Leadership Summit in Miami, April 27-29, where I took the stage Monday for a session on helping teams find their professional north star, and hosted retailers in a private meeting room all week.
Want to know where we’ll be next? See our upcoming events.
