Harrods hit by loyalty club scam

The security of Harrods’ Reward Card loyalty scheme has been called into question after a staff member managed to accrue £280,000 worth of points – over three years – from customers who failed to collect them.
Chomchanok Hongsakuulvasu admitted the scam to gather nearly 850,000 Reward Card points – worth almost £3,000 – to spend at the luxury Knightsbridge store.
While working in the Export Bureau Department of the store, the Thai national scanned the receipts on to her own loyalty card when customers did not want them.
She started the fraud in 2013, collecting 2,495 points, and remained undetected for so long that by 2015 she had collected nearly 850,000 points.
Hammersmith Magistrates’ Court heard the points would have cost more than £280,000 to collect legally.
Harrods only discovered the fraud when Hongsakuulvasu purchased items and it was noticed she had an abnormal amount of points on a loyalty card registered under a variation of her name.
She was given a 16-week jail sentence suspended for a year and ordered to pay compensation of £7,513.25 to Harrods.
District Judge Michael Snow said: “You were employed by Harrods store as a member of the Export Bureau Department, and over a period of time, starting in 2013 and ending in 2015, you claimed customer reward points which should only have been allocated to the individual customers concerned.
“An aggravating factor is the sheer scale of the points you have acquired by obtaining somehow the various receipts, and then going to your card and putting the information on the receipt onto your card.”

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