Sometimes, people get away with things for a while simply because nobody thinks to question what they’re seeing.

One picture framing store employee found that out after casually telling her district manager that their manager had left work early one Saturday.

That detail caught his attention because a large cash refund had been processed under the manager’s register code later that night.

Once the company started looking closer, they realized several suspicious returns had happened when the manager wasn’t even there.

Read on to see how the whole situation played out.

I was accidentally the downfall for a Manager-In-Training who was a total thief.

Way back in 2000, I was an adorable, naive 19-year-old working retail at a picture framing place.

The management of our little shop consisted of our Manager Jenny, the Assistant Manager Nick, and me, the “Third-Key.”

For those who don’t know, a Third-Key is literally that… a third person with keys.

I had the ability to open and close the store and act as manager-on-duty, but if Jenny or Nick was there, then I was just a regular employee.

Apparently, everyone loved the manager, Jenny.

Jenny was an amazing manager, middle-aged but cool. She’d had a LOT of fun in the 70s and wasn’t shy about telling us her hilarious stories.

She was also kind of like the shop mom. She made cookies and was always very in tune with people’s emotions. She always knew the right thing to say to make me feel better, and she was a fountain of real-world wisdom.

Everybody LOVED her.

She was also an artist, and her work was starting to pick up steam. That, combined with the onset of some health issues, made her decide that retail work just wasn’t for her anymore.

We were all really sad but definitely understood.

She was not a big fan of Steve.

Now, Nick was just a college kid and definitely didn’t want (or really qualify) to be promoted to Manager, so corporate brought in a Manager-In-Training to work as a fourth member of the management. Let’s call him Steve.

Steve was weird.

He was a huge white guy but dressed in clothes that looked like they’d come from Bill Cosby’s wardrobe. LOUD sweaters in Arizona heat.

I was basically a Golden Retriever puppy and tried to chat with him while teaching him the ropes when it was my turn to have him shadow me, but he just wouldn’t engage.

Then, Jenny started having more issues and needed some time off work.

It’s not just that, but he would stare at me while I worked. Just sit in the office chair and stare. I tried to chalk it up to him just being awkward, but it was creepy.

Even when I was trying to teach him something, he would barely interact. When he did talk, it was usually about how amazing he was at his last job and how low the pay was for managers in our company. Uh, duh, it’s retail.

Well, remember when I said that Jenny was having issues with her health? She called me one Saturday afternoon when I was off and asked if I’d come fill in for her.

Of course I did and ran down to the shop to relieve her. She was having a really bad day, and I was happy to close for her.

I also worked the next day, Sunday, and the day after that, Monday.

It just so happened that the district manager showed up one day.

That Monday, our district manager came in while I was M.O.D., and we got chatting. Like I said, I was basically a chatterbox, so this wasn’t unusual.

He asked me how Steve was doing, and I tried to diplomatically tell the guy Steve was a dud, using the example that on Saturday when I relieved Jenny, he had just sat in the office or wandered the floor the whole night.

The D.M. seemed a little startled, but not about the guy’s behavior, but by the fact that Jenny hadn’t been in the store after 3 p.m.

After being in our store for about six weeks, Steve started swapping out with another store in the neighboring city and acting as M.O.D. by himself. Steve was thrilled because he actually lived in this other city, and the rest of us just assumed this was part of his training.

Not so much.

At first, the DM thought Jenny was stealing from the store.

Turns out that there’d been a whole lot of “shrink” happening at our store. A huge uptick in people paying with credit cards and then coming back later and getting a cash refund.

Back then, if you did a return on a credit card or debit, it took a few days for the money to show back up in the account. If people got mean about it, we could do a cash refund, but it had to be approved by a member of the management by signing in with their register code and using their key.

Thousands of dollars’ worth of returns were being done in cash, multiple times a day, when before we’d have maybe one or two a week. What’s worse is that it appeared that Jenny was the one doing all these returns.

They seemed to think that Jenny was taking all she could get before she retired. That is, until I told the D.M. about filling in for Jenny.

They later found out that Steve had Jenny’s register code.

Apparently, a very large ($750) credit card transaction had been returned that night around 7 p.m., and Jenny’s code was the one used.

When I said she wasn’t even there, in my naive way, I had saved her.

It turns out that Jenny had just given Steve her register code to train him because it took a few days for him to get his own because of some computer glitch at corporate.

After my offhand remark, they took a closer look at our old schedule on paper (the management team didn’t clock in and out) and realized that half these returns were happening on days when Jenny wasn’t even there.

Finally, they caught Steve.

So they switched Steve to the store in the other city, which had a better surveillance system, and caught him using another employee’s code to pull the same trick, as well as flat-out pulling cash from the till.

I’m not sure what the actual charges were, but from what I heard, he was very startled when he showed up to work to find the District Manager and two sheriff’s detectives waiting in the other store’s office for him. He was literally perp-walked out in handcuffs!

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I was so upset that they didn’t do it in our store!

Management changed again.

Jenny ended up leaving shortly after. The stress was just too much for her.

Nick was made temporary manager, and he and I split opening and closing duties for a couple of months. I mostly opened, and he would close. There were a few managers from around that would sub in to give us days off.

Then we finally got a new manager who’d been entirely trained at other stores. He was okay, but he was no Jenny. Thankfully, he was no Steve either!

Wow! What a stupid thing to do!

Let’s take a look at what the readers over at Reddit think about what happened with Steve.

Apparently, this person witnessed something similar happen.

Here’s a reader who was also involved in something like that.

This person is just glad she shared the story.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a customer who tried to skip the checkout line but didn’t get their way.

And someone who saw the same thing happen at a department store.

Desperate people will do some pretty stupid things when they think they can get away with it.

This guy probably thought using someone else’s code would keep the attention off him.

Instead, all it took was one innocent comment for the whole thing to start falling apart.

Once people start stealing that much, though, it usually catches up with them eventually.