Soon it will be impossible to steal from self-serve checkouts

Since the scanners were first introduced almost a decade ago, customers have been abusing them, largely by putting expensive items through as much cheaper products.

Recently, a man was fined €208,000 for a self-service checkout scam involving expensive meat scanned as cheap fruit. A Queensland mum was given a suspended sentence for an elaborate self-service checkout scam that enabled her to steal $4500 in groceries.

But an automated product recognition system, been developed by an Aussie start-up company will end the ability for customers to exploit the machines. Tiliter Technology has developed the brains to drive “smart checkouts” which automatically identify a product so customers can’t cheat the system. It also removes the need for barcodes or having to enter additional information.

Co-founder Chris Sampson told news.com.au technology uses a camera to identify the product and then automatically enters the information into the point-of-sale system. “It’s based on machine learning and artificial intelligence which has been taught to recognise different types of fruit and other products. The big value for supermarkets is removing the significant loss seen from people entering the wrong information. However, customers will also benefit by not needing to search through menus trying to identify the items they are purchasing.”