23 ms·

Not uncommon in some cities in Canada to find out you're working for a criminal outfit if writing point of sale/restaurant software where they want you to produ

Not uncommon in some cities in Canada to find out you're working for a criminal outfit if writing point of sale/restaurant software where they want you to produce one receipt for the customer and a different one for the restaurant or salon or shady car mechanic that then pockets the unreported tax aka a 'zapper'. Profitek was busted once, InfoSpec Systems, zappers are in high demand

frandroid 7y ago
No wonder the Québec government swooped in and mandated a government POS terminal for the food service industry. :)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- stef25 7y ago
  They did that here in Belgium too. Didn't take very long for one of the few official manufacturers of said terminals to jailed after presumably installing a few custom features.
- cat199 7y ago
  > government POS terminal for the food service industry. :) and how did procurement for that contract go?
nitrogen 7y ago
Are these used to inflate records of customer bills for laundering, or to deflate customer bills for tax fraud?
- didericis 7y ago
  > pockets the unreported tax I’d assume tax fraud is much more common than money laundering. Maybe drug dealers and the like create enough of a market for “reverse zappers” to exist; not sure.
  - ryanmercer 7y ago
    This is anecdotal but when I was involved with an "Ultra Lounge" (upscale club) the owner had, on several occasions, individuals approach him wanting to buy a % of the club with cold hard cash. I was there for one instance, 2 guys had asked him for a meeting to get some advice on opening a pizza place or something and wanted the input of a non-competing experienced business owner in the area so he agreed to meet with them and I was there so I sat in just to see if I could learn anything from the exchange. Like we're in some cheesy movie, these guys make small talk before one sets a briefcase on the table and opens it to reveal gobs of what appeared to be 10s and 20s and proceeded to tell him they actually wanted to buy a percentage of the club cash and he shut them right down and asked them to leave. After they left he told me he was approached multiple times in the first couple years of business with such offers. People wanting to dump a bunch of cash in his lap that, presumably, he would then trickle into the coffers via fictional sales as a way for them to launder some money via their cash infusion and potentially get far more back if the club remained successful. At the time I legitimately thought they were friends of his and he was pranking me or something, it was so absurd. I came to realize though that those selling drugs definitely love clubs as we'd have kids in their early 20s coming in 1-2 times a week and buying bottle service at 300$+ a bottle to impress friends/girls week after week with no realistic way of having that much disposable income. This guy was super shady in general, and his shadiness is why we ultimately parted ways, but even that was too much for him. It would not surprise me in the least if there was a market for this for bars and clubs that had "creative" income streams on the side. He would regularly have the bartenders pour house shots (An "IV" of OJ/shot of soda water/cheapest well vodka) for free for a group of people to get them to stay (often it was bridal parties) to make the club appear busy and doing stuff like that would certainly be a way to legitimately burn through some cheap liquor that you could ring up as premium-priced cocktails. I could see restaraunts that do free refills on drinks also being able to do this by ringing up some extra drink/burger/fries sales and fudging the numbers several percent, if not ten percent, to similarly sneak illicit money in.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
gruez 7y ago
>where they want you to produce one receipt for the customer and a different one for the restaurant or salon or shady car mechanic that then pockets the unreported tax aka a 'zapper'. Isn't this super easy to discover if you use any sort of electronic payment? Salons and restaurants might be cash based, but who pays their mechanic in cash?
- samplatt 7y ago
  A lot of non-regular-maintenance jobs are easy & quick to do but break the law - for example, deleting the catalytic converter or EGR from the exhaust system will give your engine better performance and economy, but is illegal since it increases emissions. Lots of places will do it anyway on a cash job if they think they can get away with it, because it's relatively easy money. A shop replaced my failed catalytic converter ($1200+ replacement) with a straight pipe ($20 pipe and $200 of time) many years ago because they (correctly) assessed me to be a broke-ass student who wouldn't tell on them.
  - bArray 7y ago
    > A shop replaced my failed catalytic converter ($1200+ > replacement) with a straight pipe ($20 pipe and $200 of > time) many years ago because they (correctly) assessed me > to be a broke-ass student who wouldn't tell on them. The mechanic may have even made even more money by scrapping your catalytic converter. In the UK, swapping the exhaust out for a straight pipe is a common (illegal) modification for greater performance and sound. To get the car through the MOT, you either need to find somebody willing to "look the other way" or re-weld the original exhaust in place. I've seen in many scenarios "boy racers" dipping the clutch and coasting the car by the police. If your car is making a sound resembling a Spitfire you're sure to get pulled over, where they'll use a road side test kit and confiscate your car. Some other popular cheap modifications include completely removing the air-filter (dangerous), stretching tires to create low-profile wheels (extremely dangerous if they let go [0]), putting the car on a diet (ripping out all interior, seats, etc), running contaminated fuel (either diesel/petrol mixes [1] or running farmer's diesel) - the list goes on. There are also some processes for purposely causing the car to backfire regularly (especially on a down change, with quite large flames) and getting more "bang" from the fuel. At one point we were also experimenting with the idea of using the starter motor strategically to aid engine acceleration - but nothing ever came of it. [0] We had a car crash on the motorway into the central barrier, which then caused all of the tires to instantly disintegrate - all at ~90 mph (~145 kph). [1] We once had a vehicle literally explode when unburned fuel collected in the catalytic converter/exhaust and suddenly decide it wanted to be on fire. This in itself wouldn't have been an issue if a) somebody noticed and b) it didn't then ignite the fuel lines.
PappaPatat 7y ago
My first sale of my selfwritten software (about 35 years ago) was for a car driving instructor. The initial sales conversations where difficult. I thought they did not see the advantages of having their planning & bookkeeping in a computer... How wrong I was. It was their "creative bookkeeping" that worried them. When I offered to make that all possible ('zapping' as it is called now), they loved it. Based on their referrals I sold it many times over. Come next customer / market: bookshops. Guess what the most important selling argument was, besides easy cataloging, inventory, searching, website publishing and reporting? Right: zapping. Thought me an important rule: do not underestimate what your customer is NOT telling you.
- Brave-Steak 7y ago
  You weren't worried about getting into trouble?
- skrebbel 7y ago
  Did it bother you that you were facilitating crimes?
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    Tax evasion is a fairly soft crime, it’s shouldn’t be surprising there are people okay with facilitating it. It’s not difficult to find people who believe, rightly or wrongly, the tax system is unfair.
    - scandox 7y ago
      It's a funny one because it's potentially one of the most serious crimes. You're stealing from everybody, undermining the basis of trust in the entire system in which we live and probably in the long term eroding the basis of democracy. You're creating a non-level playing field. On the other hand, black and grey market activity are also I think quite an important counter-balance to the possibility of totalitarian government. It creates "gaps" let's say for more diverse human and economic outcomes. Which is also potentially good. I think it's one of those indefensible things that we should tolerate a tiny amount of. Kind of like a vaccine in the body.
tyfon 7y ago
I assume it is common to report the company to the authorities when a request like that comes in? Where I live at least not reporting activity like that could result in a few years in jail.
- badpun 7y ago
  In Poland you're only required to report a crime if you're a civil servant and the crime is related to your job.
  - tyfon 7y ago
    Here in Norway there are special provisions for tax fraud and money laundering. It doesn't apply to "normal" crime only those. But it does apply for everyone not just civil servants.
    - badpun 7y ago
      So if for example I know that my uncle is not paying all his taxes I'm a criminal too unless I report him? Or is it only for bigger frauds?
      - tyfon 7y ago
        Yes if the government can prove that you knew about it without telling, you can be charged with it.
        speedplane 7y ago
        >> So if for example I know that my uncle is not paying all his taxes I'm a criminal too unless I report him? Or is it only for bigger frauds? > Yes if the government can prove that you knew about it without telling, you can be charged with it. That's not generally true. In the vast majority of cases, simply knowing about a crime and not reporting it is not a crime in itself. You only become liable when you aid-and-abet or join in a conspiracy to commit the crime. However, it depends very much on the specific crime. Tax evasion may be entirely different than say selling drugs.
dcustodio 7y ago
Years ago the Portuguese government encouraged consumers to submit their receipts in a portal and each submitted receipt was a entry to a raffle where the prizes were luxury cars. This way they could match the receipts from consumers with the ones reported by the shops. It felt wrong to put citizens policing the shops but it worked.
- kaybe 7y ago
  Taiwan does that too. If you leave the country you can drop them off at one of the charity boxes using it for income.
- jonathanstrange 7y ago
  The system still in place, if I'm not totally mistaken. (I haven't checked, because I usually don't give away my tax number for sheer laziness - I still don't know it by heart.)
- severak_cz 7y ago
  we have something similar in Czech republic. It's called Účtenkovka (receipt lottery) and some con men discovered it and started their scams there.
- endorphone 7y ago
  I remember visiting Italy and we were warned repeatedly to always take and keep receipts, even if just getting a gelato -- that after the transaction the police could demand it, with punitive measures if you don't have it. This system was to ensure that shopkeepers were actually keeping receipts. The GST/HST system in Canada sort of serves the same purpose. It is an overarching tax system that seems redundant in that every business then can claim back every bit of GST they've paid out. But to do so you have to have receipts for everything, from every source, and when they randomly do an audit they aren't checking you as much as they're building a profile of every other business you interacted with. Tax avoidance is a problem in every country.
- breischl 7y ago
  At a different level that's part of the reason receipts exist, and why you occasionally see things like "if we don't give you a receipt your order is free." In those cases it's typically about preventing the employees from not ringing up the sale and just pocketing the cash. The receipt proves that the order was entered into the system. Same idea, just a difference of who's stealing from whom. Hm, I suppose that scam is less of a problem in the era of credit cards.
hawkice 7y ago
I resigned from a software development job after being asked to write this dual receipt system for an AdTech company. Works for a lot more than tax avoidance in an industry where standard terms are revenue share agreements.
auxym 7y ago
Are you implying this only happens in Canada? If so, why is that you think? Genuinely curious, if the US has managed to implement effective anti-tax avoidance solutions, could they be implemented here?
- dspillett 7y ago
  > Are you implying this only happens in Canada? I read that as the OP saying they had specific experience/knowledge of it happing there, rather than intending to imply it happens there more than anywhere else.
mozey 7y ago
Lol, in South Africa we have a mobile payments app called "Zapper"

frandroid 7y ago

No wonder the Québec government swooped in and mandated a government POS terminal for the food service industry. :)

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
stef25 7y ago
They did that here in Belgium too. Didn't take very long for one of the few official manufacturers of said terminals to jailed after presumably installing a few custom features.
cat199 7y ago
> government POS terminal for the food service industry. :) and how did procurement for that contract go?

nitrogen 7y ago

Are these used to inflate records of customer bills for laundering, or to deflate customer bills for tax fraud?

didericis 7y ago
> pockets the unreported tax I’d assume tax fraud is much more common than money laundering. Maybe drug dealers and the like create enough of a market for “reverse zappers” to exist; not sure.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  This is anecdotal but when I was involved with an "Ultra Lounge" (upscale club) the owner had, on several occasions, individuals approach him wanting to buy a % of the club with cold hard cash. I was there for one instance, 2 guys had asked him for a meeting to get some advice on opening a pizza place or something and wanted the input of a non-competing experienced business owner in the area so he agreed to meet with them and I was there so I sat in just to see if I could learn anything from the exchange. Like we're in some cheesy movie, these guys make small talk before one sets a briefcase on the table and opens it to reveal gobs of what appeared to be 10s and 20s and proceeded to tell him they actually wanted to buy a percentage of the club cash and he shut them right down and asked them to leave. After they left he told me he was approached multiple times in the first couple years of business with such offers. People wanting to dump a bunch of cash in his lap that, presumably, he would then trickle into the coffers via fictional sales as a way for them to launder some money via their cash infusion and potentially get far more back if the club remained successful. At the time I legitimately thought they were friends of his and he was pranking me or something, it was so absurd. I came to realize though that those selling drugs definitely love clubs as we'd have kids in their early 20s coming in 1-2 times a week and buying bottle service at 300$+ a bottle to impress friends/girls week after week with no realistic way of having that much disposable income. This guy was super shady in general, and his shadiness is why we ultimately parted ways, but even that was too much for him. It would not surprise me in the least if there was a market for this for bars and clubs that had "creative" income streams on the side. He would regularly have the bartenders pour house shots (An "IV" of OJ/shot of soda water/cheapest well vodka) for free for a group of people to get them to stay (often it was bridal parties) to make the club appear busy and doing stuff like that would certainly be a way to legitimately burn through some cheap liquor that you could ring up as premium-priced cocktails. I could see restaraunts that do free refills on drinks also being able to do this by ringing up some extra drink/burger/fries sales and fudging the numbers several percent, if not ten percent, to similarly sneak illicit money in.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

gruez 7y ago

>where they want you to produce one receipt for the customer and a different one for the restaurant or salon or shady car mechanic that then pockets the unreported tax aka a 'zapper'. Isn't this super easy to discover if you use any sort of electronic payment? Salons and restaurants might be cash based, but who pays their mechanic in cash?

samplatt 7y ago
A lot of non-regular-maintenance jobs are easy & quick to do but break the law - for example, deleting the catalytic converter or EGR from the exhaust system will give your engine better performance and economy, but is illegal since it increases emissions. Lots of places will do it anyway on a cash job if they think they can get away with it, because it's relatively easy money. A shop replaced my failed catalytic converter ($1200+ replacement) with a straight pipe ($20 pipe and $200 of time) many years ago because they (correctly) assessed me to be a broke-ass student who wouldn't tell on them.
- bArray 7y ago
  > A shop replaced my failed catalytic converter ($1200+ > replacement) with a straight pipe ($20 pipe and $200 of > time) many years ago because they (correctly) assessed me > to be a broke-ass student who wouldn't tell on them. The mechanic may have even made even more money by scrapping your catalytic converter. In the UK, swapping the exhaust out for a straight pipe is a common (illegal) modification for greater performance and sound. To get the car through the MOT, you either need to find somebody willing to "look the other way" or re-weld the original exhaust in place. I've seen in many scenarios "boy racers" dipping the clutch and coasting the car by the police. If your car is making a sound resembling a Spitfire you're sure to get pulled over, where they'll use a road side test kit and confiscate your car. Some other popular cheap modifications include completely removing the air-filter (dangerous), stretching tires to create low-profile wheels (extremely dangerous if they let go [0]), putting the car on a diet (ripping out all interior, seats, etc), running contaminated fuel (either diesel/petrol mixes [1] or running farmer's diesel) - the list goes on. There are also some processes for purposely causing the car to backfire regularly (especially on a down change, with quite large flames) and getting more "bang" from the fuel. At one point we were also experimenting with the idea of using the starter motor strategically to aid engine acceleration - but nothing ever came of it. [0] We had a car crash on the motorway into the central barrier, which then caused all of the tires to instantly disintegrate - all at ~90 mph (~145 kph). [1] We once had a vehicle literally explode when unburned fuel collected in the catalytic converter/exhaust and suddenly decide it wanted to be on fire. This in itself wouldn't have been an issue if a) somebody noticed and b) it didn't then ignite the fuel lines.

PappaPatat 7y ago

My first sale of my selfwritten software (about 35 years ago) was for a car driving instructor. The initial sales conversations where difficult. I thought they did not see the advantages of having their planning & bookkeeping in a computer... How wrong I was. It was their "creative bookkeeping" that worried them. When I offered to make that all possible ('zapping' as it is called now), they loved it. Based on their referrals I sold it many times over. Come next customer / market: bookshops. Guess what the most important selling argument was, besides easy cataloging, inventory, searching, website publishing and reporting? Right: zapping. Thought me an important rule: do not underestimate what your customer is NOT telling you.

Brave-Steak 7y ago
You weren't worried about getting into trouble?
skrebbel 7y ago
Did it bother you that you were facilitating crimes?
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  Tax evasion is a fairly soft crime, it’s shouldn’t be surprising there are people okay with facilitating it. It’s not difficult to find people who believe, rightly or wrongly, the tax system is unfair.
  - scandox 7y ago
    It's a funny one because it's potentially one of the most serious crimes. You're stealing from everybody, undermining the basis of trust in the entire system in which we live and probably in the long term eroding the basis of democracy. You're creating a non-level playing field. On the other hand, black and grey market activity are also I think quite an important counter-balance to the possibility of totalitarian government. It creates "gaps" let's say for more diverse human and economic outcomes. Which is also potentially good. I think it's one of those indefensible things that we should tolerate a tiny amount of. Kind of like a vaccine in the body.

tyfon 7y ago

I assume it is common to report the company to the authorities when a request like that comes in? Where I live at least not reporting activity like that could result in a few years in jail.

badpun 7y ago
In Poland you're only required to report a crime if you're a civil servant and the crime is related to your job.
- tyfon 7y ago
  Here in Norway there are special provisions for tax fraud and money laundering. It doesn't apply to "normal" crime only those. But it does apply for everyone not just civil servants.
  - badpun 7y ago
    So if for example I know that my uncle is not paying all his taxes I'm a criminal too unless I report him? Or is it only for bigger frauds?
    - tyfon 7y ago
      Yes if the government can prove that you knew about it without telling, you can be charged with it.
      - speedplane 7y ago
        >> So if for example I know that my uncle is not paying all his taxes I'm a criminal too unless I report him? Or is it only for bigger frauds? > Yes if the government can prove that you knew about it without telling, you can be charged with it. That's not generally true. In the vast majority of cases, simply knowing about a crime and not reporting it is not a crime in itself. You only become liable when you aid-and-abet or join in a conspiracy to commit the crime. However, it depends very much on the specific crime. Tax evasion may be entirely different than say selling drugs.

dcustodio 7y ago

Years ago the Portuguese government encouraged consumers to submit their receipts in a portal and each submitted receipt was a entry to a raffle where the prizes were luxury cars. This way they could match the receipts from consumers with the ones reported by the shops. It felt wrong to put citizens policing the shops but it worked.

kaybe 7y ago
Taiwan does that too. If you leave the country you can drop them off at one of the charity boxes using it for income.
jonathanstrange 7y ago
The system still in place, if I'm not totally mistaken. (I haven't checked, because I usually don't give away my tax number for sheer laziness - I still don't know it by heart.)
severak_cz 7y ago
we have something similar in Czech republic. It's called Účtenkovka (receipt lottery) and some con men discovered it and started their scams there.
endorphone 7y ago
I remember visiting Italy and we were warned repeatedly to always take and keep receipts, even if just getting a gelato -- that after the transaction the police could demand it, with punitive measures if you don't have it. This system was to ensure that shopkeepers were actually keeping receipts. The GST/HST system in Canada sort of serves the same purpose. It is an overarching tax system that seems redundant in that every business then can claim back every bit of GST they've paid out. But to do so you have to have receipts for everything, from every source, and when they randomly do an audit they aren't checking you as much as they're building a profile of every other business you interacted with. Tax avoidance is a problem in every country.
breischl 7y ago
At a different level that's part of the reason receipts exist, and why you occasionally see things like "if we don't give you a receipt your order is free." In those cases it's typically about preventing the employees from not ringing up the sale and just pocketing the cash. The receipt proves that the order was entered into the system. Same idea, just a difference of who's stealing from whom. Hm, I suppose that scam is less of a problem in the era of credit cards.

hawkice 7y ago

I resigned from a software development job after being asked to write this dual receipt system for an AdTech company. Works for a lot more than tax avoidance in an industry where standard terms are revenue share agreements.

auxym 7y ago

Are you implying this only happens in Canada? If so, why is that you think? Genuinely curious, if the US has managed to implement effective anti-tax avoidance solutions, could they be implemented here?

dspillett 7y ago
> Are you implying this only happens in Canada? I read that as the OP saying they had specific experience/knowledge of it happing there, rather than intending to imply it happens there more than anywhere else.

mozey 7y ago

Lol, in South Africa we have a mobile payments app called "Zapper"