The Virginian-Pilot
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Workers: Beware of your presence on the Internet, especially if you're doing something wrong.
Dollar Tree suspected a cashier was abusing a workers' compensation claim for which she'd received more than $100,000 over a year and a half for back problems, said Joe Helm, corporate asset protection manager for the Chesapeake-based chain. Dollar Tree found the worker's MySpace page, where she mentioned a side job taking photos that weekend for a wedding.
The retailer's representatives found the employee lugging camera equipment and picking up children at the event, showing no signs of back pain. Dollar Tree later won its appeal of her case, Helm said Thursday at the Virginia Retail Loss Prevention Conference at the Hilton Norfolk Airport.
When Dollar Tree suspected a security guard in the theft of merchandise from a distribution center, Helm's team set up a Google Alert using the product names. It picked up similar products for sale on Craigslist, under the account of the guard's spouse. Helm used Google Maps to zoom in on the guard's home, but saw no storage unit near the house. So he called nearby storage companies, using the guard's name. After he found a match, police recovered 90 percent of the stolen goods, Helm said.
"People don't realize," he told attendees, "how much exposure there is on the Internet."
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Retailer's "representatives"?
I don't condone theft. It's dishonest and costly for any business, especially one as big as Dollar Tree, and ultimately translates into higher costs for customers. But they could at least be honest and say that its "representatives" are actually investigators or private eyes sent to spy on employees. I guess if you have an honest claim against them you'd better watch where you go.
Employees be ware
www.spectersoft.com has a program that employers can install in the network and on your office PC and find out to the minute, how long an employee has been on the internet, to what sites and for how long, it will even give your employer access to all your passwords, bank accounts, and all sorts of things that you thought were secure and private, and will copy key strokes and give the employer a weekly and monthly report of exactly how much time you spent on personal business vs Co. business. Additionally, as long as you are doing this at work, he gets away with it, and has grounds to dismiss you nothing you can do. so BEWARE !!! Check out the site.....To be fore warned is to be fore armed..
Meanwhile, when citizens
Meanwhile, when citizens were fed up that their local gov't was posting their social security and other private data online in the open, they started posting their representatives information. The politicians then made it illegal for a citizen to post their information, but offered no protection for the citizens.