A familiar story: an unmarried mother in a village near Besançon was finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet as everything from apples through toilet rolls to train tickets seemed to get more expensive by the month. Then she found a solution. One day, standing in line at her local Leclerc supermarket, she overheard someone say that the security system at one of the caisses wasn’t working. This gave her an idea ... and across more than half a year she stole goods on 3600 separate occasions with a total value of some €85,000.
To start with she took food and other household items, then she got more ambitious – regularly heading out of the store with CDs, DVDs, calculators and video games. She sold these where she could but then as her loot mounted up she launched her own trading post on eBay. And that’s how she came unstuck. Such sites are routinely monitored by the police. The lady’s activities aroused curiosity and soon she got an unexpected visit. It was useless to deny what she’d been up to: the eBay record of her sales corresponded closely with listed losses at Leclerc.
Her clients who were contacted said she was a pleasure to deal with, “polite and helpful”. And Leclerc? “We’ve got egg on our face,” admitted a company spokesman. “It’s just unbelievable that nobody picked up for so long on that defective check-out security system. Of course, there’s thieving all the time – we lose about five per cent of our stock that way – but this was something special.” As we noted a few issues back, Brits rank ahead of the French in their enthusiasm for shoplifting but there’s no doubt who gets the gold medal.

From Riviera Reporter Issue 125: Feb/March 2008

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