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A French teenager has been jailed after buying a PlayStation 4 for under £8 by weighing it as if the games console was a huge bag of fruit.
The 19-year-old man, named in the French media as Adel, picked the device off the shelf and took it to the fruit section and weighed it.
He then put a sticker with the heavily reduced price tag on the expensive console and went to the checkout.
Adel paid £7.86 (€9) for the 6lb bag of 'fruit' at a self-checkout at a supermarket in Montbeliard, eastern France, last September.
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Teenager Jailed After Buying PS4 for £8 by Weighing it and Paying for it as Food
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Wednesday October 06 2021, @03:10PM
He isn't really very smart, certainly not after trying it a second time. If he had just done it once and never returned then sure it would have worked. But this is just one of those things, or at least should have been, while brainstorming the idea and thinking about how you would abuse this system -- take something expensive, scan something cheap, put cheap sticker on expensive item, $$$.
This is a known issue with all forms of self-check-out systems. Scan cheap, pick expensive. It's theft or fraud when you do it since you can't really claim it was a mistake if you get caught. One of the things they do is they put scales and such in the platform where you put your items after you scanned them at the exit so they'll see if the items match weight (ie you can't pick and scan one apple and then put 10 in the bag that you then put on the checkout-scales). In that regard he was "smart", even tho I believe it was by accident, as the weight here will be the same.
I'm a little surprised the system even allowed it but then I guess they didn't implement all the security features they thought off, or should have.