West Des Moines Arrest Barely Dents $16.2 Billion Annual Problem

It might have struck his supervisors as odd that Andrew Malick Foley, 22, of 9005 Bridgewood Blvd., didn’t use his employee discount during shopping sprees at the store at , where he worked.

Odder, though, was that when he returned clothing items for cash, the clothing didn’t match any of the lines carried by the store, according to Robert Nichols, a loss prevention officer at Younkers who reported the results of an internal investigation to on May 30.

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Nichols alleged that after Foley purchased the items at regular price. Then, on another day when Foley was working, an unknown man would use Foley’s receipt to make fraudulent returns and “act as though he was returning the merchandise, but in fact, he was returning clothing items that had not been purchased at Younkers,” Officer Matthew Granzow wrote in his report.

Some of the transactions were videotaped after store management became suspicious.

Younkers lost about $1,715 in the 16 transactions, according to Granzow’s report. Granzow wrote in his report that when he interviewed Foley, he acknowledged that the allegations were true.

Foley was charged with second-degree theft and booked at the Polk County Jail. He is no longer in custody.

Employee fraud and theft cost the nation’s retail sector $16.2 billion in 2010, the latest year for which statistics are available, accounting for 43.7 percent of total losses.

Of those, 18.7 percent involved collusion between “internal and external bad actors,” according to the National Retail Federation.