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Retailers brace for return fraud in the holiday season

Fraudulent schemes include "wardrobing" and the return of shoplifted items.

Retailers brace for return fraud in the holiday season
jarmoluk/Visual hunt

During the holiday season, shoppers spend billions of dollars on gifts — and some of those gifts will be returned. For retailers, that means being extra cautious. Last holiday season, return fraud was a $2 billion problem, according to the National Retail Federation. Fraudulent schemes include “wardrobing,” where people buy clothes, wear them and then return them; invoice fraud, where people fudge invoices to inflate the return price; and shoplifting returns, where people who steal items from a store try to return them for cash.

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