I’m a lawyer – there are three groups of people accused of self-checkout theft and only one is guilty

A LAWYER has uncovered the three groups of people she believes are accused of stealing from self-checkout shops.

Thousands of stores across the country have installed self-checkout stations to improve the customer experience, but some continue to use the system.

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Carrie Jernigan, who shares her legal expertise on TikTok, says there are currently three groups of people accused of self-checkout theft.

The first group to be charged with shoplifting are those who enter the store with the intention of stealing.

“When self-checkout first started, it was a very simple approach to theft,” she says.

Jernigan says people would scan a few items they wanted to pay for and then toss a few extra items into their shopping bag.

“Now they know it won’t work. The system is too good to do something that simple.”

The attorney says people will now enter the store with barcodes on their hands for much cheaper items and scan them while putting more expensive items in their shopping bags.

“It’s become a lot harder for asset protection to identify these thefts,” says Jernigan.

The second group, the attorney says, are those who she genuinely believe have forgotten to scan an item in their shopping cart.

She says it’s usually something small or at the bottom of the shopping cart that’s been forgotten.

When self-checkout was first launched, Jernigan says, these people would be stopped on the way out of the store by asset protection and either pay for the accidentally stolen item or take it before the customer left the store.

Now, she says, big department stores are adopting a “tell the judge” approach as theft at self-checkout points becomes more common.

Jernigan calls the third group “the truly innocent.”

“Most of these [people] are not burdened day after day,” she says.

Instead, these people are targeted when Asset Protection conducts quality checks or inventory checks days, weeks, or months later, and start looking at hours of security camera footage when they fall short.

They’re analyzing the footage to see who were the last customers to pick up the items that fell short of inventory checks, says Jernigan.

“Because of who these big department stores are, they usually have to provide very little evidence to get an affidavit for a warrant.

“The charges that could land you in jail for up to a year are filed and then you’re fighting for your life trying to figure out what day you were at Walmart, everything you bought – you must have thousands of dollars.” spend to hire a lawyer and we have to go through grainy video footage to figure out what you bought that day,” says Jernigan.

These people must then try to prove their innocence, which can be even more difficult if you paid cash.

Often, Jernigan says, charges against people in this category are dropped after their attorney can prove nothing was stolen.

But the damage is already done.

Jernigan’s video has been viewed more than 2.7 million times.