SAN ANTONIO — A credit card scheme has put one local business out thousands of dollars.
The owner of two Red Wing Shoes locations in San Antonio says he had to file several police reports for credit card fraud and shoplifting.
He did not want to be identified but is hoping police catch the suspects.
“We’ve experienced nine different incidents over the past months,” he said.
He has a location in Stone Oak and off Walzem Road. In both stores, they have several security cameras set up.
On August 23, his cameras captured a group of men shoplifting.
“These aren’t guys wearing ski masks or baseball caps or covid masks,” he said. “They’re fearless.”
But that is not all they are suspected of stealing. He said they also used a fake credit card to buy several items.
“They have lots of these available to them and because the method they use that requires us to manually key in the card numbers, the merchant is fully responsible for the transaction,” he said.
He said the same group, and another man who has acted alone, has hit his other location as well.
“Several days later, the victim discovers they have these charges on the account and then files the claim with the bank who then reverses the charges, and we lose the merchandise and the sale,” he said.
Jason Meza is with the Better Business Bureau. He said this is an issue for small businesses everywhere.
“There was 11 billion in charge back fraud or friendly fraud this last year,” Meza said. “It’s expected to go up another 40 or 50 percent this year.”
Meza encourages businesses to be careful when they are entering credit cards manually.
“Therein lies that fraud potential when you eliminate all those safe checks and barriers,” Meza said. “If you’re a merchant, if you’re someone in business, just don’t skip those steps.”
This business owner said he wanted to speak up to spare other businesses the financial burden he is now bearing.
“We lost trust in our employees in our process now because they’ve been successful and so it’s caused people to lose their jobs,” he said.