Ah but the gas station guy is a kettle not a frequent flyer so it's entirely different (Yes that is sarcasm btw)

If the employee is using his own card to collect points it is theft, as he is stealing from his employer, who has to buy the points from Air Miles.

No different than him entering a $ off coupon after the fact and keeping the money.

Clearly the only solution is a new federal "Mileage Security Agency" to help prevent such horrible abuses of mileage programs. This job creating program will ensure safety for all mileage users.

I used to work as a cashier at a regional grocery store in the U.S. and whenever people didn't have a membership card I would either scan the store's card or scan my own. I guess you could say I would get benefits on my card, but rarely useful ones (lets face it, I wasn't buying turkeys as a 17 year old). I mainly did it because I wanted to minimize the complaining, "but that's supposed to be that price!" and get customers in and out faster and happier. I'm not saying that all cashiers that scan other cards do it for this purpose, I'm merely suggesting that it is a possibility they are doing it for customer service and sanity reasons. In any case, I'm pretty sure I made more of a profit searching for lost coins and can return deposit tickets stuck under the belt.

I wasn't trolling and I agree nobody will probably go after the clerk. However, it is clearly illegal, regardless if u think there are no state lines in Canada.

States/provinces/auto nomous regions whatever.

The main thing is that a greedy clerk does this long enough and an IRs or Cra agent is his customer and they may rat on him.

+1 to this:

If they get caught doing that however, they may be fired. Supermarket employees are specfically told that that is a breach of employment and a disciplinary offence. And in years of shopping at Tescos, I've never seen any do it (that said, I always have my card). Similarly with vouchers for schools etc... althuogh they are happy to pass them onto other customers (if you request them to do so), they are not meant to accept them themselves.

Considering that CRA does not consider points to be taxable I still think you're just making wild accusations without any basis. This is no different than using your friend/family/spouse's loyalty card when you go shopping.

only if you sit in the store and take the discount from every customer that doesn't have a card:

"excuse me sir/madam, I would like to help you by getting a discount, and I will in fact keep that discount and yes this is the 10th time today that I am doing it"

Also, the store will not even let you pay full price:

"sir did you forget your card, or do you want to apply for another one"

so it's apples and oranges.

and the CRA example does not imply that there are taxable consequences, only that if the wrong person sees the clerk committing wire fraud and laundering points (yeah i said it, dirty points).... there could be a problem, however small that chance is.

it's not a wild accusation...it's fraud, but very unlikely that anything comes of it.

Can you post what law it is breaking?

Thanks,

If points are not taxable then surely they cannot be classified as a discount either since he's not getting any cashback or anything of the sort?

Theft

I'm not sure that this would be considered theft. IANAL, but I feel like this my be more on the immoral, unethical side than illegal side.

Aeroplan versus Air Miles- Unfare Comparison
 

For the record, anyone who think Air Miles gives points "at a very low rate" needs to have a closer look. I'm an Aeroplan Elite, but I carefully consider where I direct my points, and often Air Miles is the better value if your actually planning to use the points for travel.

For example, you buy $70 worth of gas at Shell and normally you would get about 4 points. If I buy premium grade (both my cars take it) and make a store purchase (lets say a $10 lottery ticket) I get 10x points, bumping me up to 40. I do that once a week for a year and my spend is $4160 (including the lottery ticket). that would net me 2080 air miles. By the way, that doesn't include any extra point for using an Air Miles credit card.

I live in Halifax, and because I hold a Air Miles Mastercard my travel redemptions are reduced by 25%.

Off season rate Halifax to Chicago or New York (with M/C reduction) is 956 Air Miles, so I actually have more than enough for two tickets. As an added bonus when you redeem it's like calling a travel agent, they simply buy the tickets, so there's no limited alotement of seats. I usually take my wife shopping in New York a couple times a year using them, AND I can normally get Aeroplan miles on the air Miles redemption trips (usually take Continental from Halifax to New York just after Thanksgiving).

$4160 at Esso gets you what, 1386 aeroplan miles. Well, your almost halfway to a $20 Uniprix gift card, enjoy!

Stealing from your employer is theft. Does not matter that you found a new way to game the system.

You cannot polish this turd and call it immoral or unethical. If the employee in question was taking these points, it is theft.

Employer buys points, employee steals them from the employer. No different than stealing cash.

Theft Money Laundering Wire Fraud and Bad Taste.

I don't think this would work where I live because if you buy gas and charge it to your credit card, the price is 10 cents per gallon higher (this started around 2008). So, effectively, the clerk would be paying 10 cents for every $4 or so charged (or 2.50%) for the benefit.

Otherwise, any of us could just hang out by the pumps and offer to run our credit cards through for any customer paying cash (and maybe offer them a trinket in exchange) and take the cash from them.

Hmmm. Anybody live where they no longer charge a premium for using a credit card for a gas purchase?

Lots of cry babies in this thread.

Again, the clerk did not use his own credit card to pay for the customer's purchase. The customer used his own credit card. And I've never seen a place which charged a premium for buying fuel on a credit card, actually some places give you a discount for paying by credit card.

I've never seen a gas station give a discount for paying with credit card over cash. Never.


I've seen many gas stations listing two prices:

87 octane: 2.899 cash
87 octane: 2.999 credit card

http://www.thelakewoodscoop.com/news...credi-sign.jpg

If the clerk is using a personal credit card, then this is also an excellent way to get free cash advances. Normally, in order to get cash advances there is a higher APR than for purchases. If the clerk pays off the credit card bill off every cycle, then there is 0% cash advance fee, and clerk also racks up airline miles! Of course, the owner then has to pay an significant fee for all the credit card purchases. Many gas stations around here don't charge anything extra for charging gas on a credit card. But, this sounds complicated because customers often want a cash receipt and/or change. At any rate, I would find it unlikely that a cash-strapped DA office would bother to go after somebody gaming the system. Heck, the DA around here no longer even investigates check fraud. Now that's what I call real "theft."

At Essos in Canada you get a 1.5 c/L discount if you use a "speedpass" connected to your credit card. (contactless payment system) I'd never fill somewhere where it cost me more to pay by credit card. Seriously, what decade are we living in?

It is illegal
 

I should start by saying we don't know if the Clerk was scanning an air miles like object for a procedural reason. Shell in Canada often requires strange things to be scanned to activate different promotions and deal with air miles. It's possible the clerk was being perfectly legitimate.

If the clerk was collecting the points for his own benefit he likely committed "theft under" contrary to the Criminal Code of Canada.

Aeroplan and Air Miles are taxable benefits by the CRA (at least if collected the course of employment). See Griffen et al. v The Queen [1995] (Tax Court of Canada). Yes - that means you're supposed to declare them.

The points do have value and they didn't belong to him. He took them.

The rough value of 40 air miles is $4.00. (Air Miles are generally worth about $0.10 - $0.15 each - I'm not getting into that explanation here).

It is not that likely the Crown (Canadian prosecutor) would be interested in going after a gas store clerk who probably didn't know he was stealing.

More importantly to the clerk, it is probably a breach of his terms of employment. We cannot know for sure but it's a good guess.

This happens a lot at companies with reward programs that don't have to be connected to a credit card (shopper's drug mart, sobey's, famous players, to name a few).

So there we are.

There is more to it than such a simplified statement.
http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/bsnss/tp.../menu-eng.html
The clerk did not convert to cash and it almost certainly wasn't part of an arrangement with his employer, so it would not be taxable. Against the terms of his employment? Possibly. Ethically questionable? Probably.

I'm curious if people in this thread would think differently if the clerk had simply asked (and been given) permission from the customer first.

The clerk is making $9/hour, I'm pretty sure they don't have an extensive list of terms besides "show up on time, accept payments, and make change"

wow if the government comes after you in canada, they still have the queen of england as the plaintiff?

no wonder she's on the loonie (or is it the toonie?)

She's on all coins and the $20 bill.

If the state comes after you criminally the style of cause is always
"R v [your name]" The R stands for "Rex (King) or Regina (Queen)".

Technically, when you sue the government it is "[Your name] v Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Ontario" or something like that. Usually it just shows up as [you] v Ontario.

It's all a formality though and doesn't really mean much.

I've gone way off topic but thought it might be interesting to share.

That's common in Germany too, or at least it used to be...
Here you get between 1 and 10 "Shell Clubsmart" Points per Liter (depending on Membership and type of Petrol) that you can trade to Air Berlin Miles which are amongst the most valuable miles there are (if only for the fact that it's one of the few programs that lets you pay taxes with miles) and Accor Hotel Points.

Have seen a few occasions where employees scan their own cards - I would do it in a heartbeat. That way any gas station clerk will be able to afford two intercontinental holidays per year (if they even know what their points are worth and don't trade em for less valuable things) ^

Unfortunately I haven't seen it in a while - still hoping to find one of those clerks again to buy their miles :D

Actually, she's the Queen of Canada as well. And I find that tone rather offensive.

Yeah why not? I'd do it too.

imo.. not a cc charge fee.. but the operator does pay for the miles to redeem..

whether its the location operator, or corporate, there is a cost associated to divying out miles..

Consider yourself lucky.

I don't actually drive for most of the year now so I don't even have to worry about this anymore! :D

I've never seen it before neither.. until I hit California this past summer..

and we've visited Florida, Texas, Cancun and Hawaii this year..

Just floored me when the cashier said that I had to pay extra more than what the posted sign said the price was.. I pointed to the sign.. and it was a cash price (unadvertised), and it was already $4.79 per gallon..:eek:

I can't speak to the legality under Canadian law, but I'm certain it's against the employment conditions.

A friend who works at a grocery chain tells me that using his personal loyalty card for customers is forbidden. First, the whole point of the loyalty card is the data mining aspect, which is frustrated if all the transactions are funneled into one card. Second, they're running a promotion where you can get 10c/gallon discount on gasoline for every $100 spend. For someone working a register, it would be very easy to max this out at $1/gallon off.

They had at one time used a store card to avoid arguments with customers over getting discounted prices, but were told to stop (again, the data mining).

He's not allowed to benefit in any personal way from transactions he processes.