What happened in this coffee culture payment fraud case?

A milk tea shop employee was fired after replacing the store's payment channel with a personal QR code and keeping customer payments. The owner posted in-store surveillance footage on social media showing the worker presenting her own code, telling customers the payment device was malfunctioning. Accounting records showed repeated anomalies, and the store says it has gathered evidence and plans to report the case to police.

The story spread quickly on trending searches once media outlets reported it, drawing attention from the food and beverage trade. For specialty coffee shops, it highlights everyday management gaps: cashless payments, staff working alone, and daily reconciliation. The owner said the employee was observed for a long time and did not stop, which is why surveillance evidence was collected before any police report.

Recently, a news story about a milk tea shop employee who replaced the store's payment collection channel with a personal payment code and embezzled the business revenue has attracted widespread attention. The shop owner exposed in-store surveillance footage on social media, showing the employee presenting a personal payment code to customers while working alone and inducing consumers to scan it by claiming the "payment device was malfunctioning." The owner said the accounting anomalies had persisted for a long time, but the employee did not stop. The store has now collected all surveillance evidence and is preparing to call the police. This incident not only exposed loopholes in the store's daily management but also once again sparked discussions in the food and beverage industry about payment security and employee integrity.

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According to recent reports by First Scene and several other media outlets, an employee at a milk tea shop is suspected of using a personal QR code to collect customer payments and keeping the store's business revenue for herself. After the owner noticed the anomalies, the employee was dismissed. Related topics quickly topped the trending search list after the news aired.

It is understood that the owner of this milk tea shop posted in-store surveillance footage on social media. In the video, the employee can be seen directly taking out the payment QR code on her own phone for customers to scan when taking orders and settling bills. The owner also revealed that this employee had repeatedly used the excuse that "the cash register equipment was having problems," deliberately exiting the cash register system interface or turning off the barcode scanner, making customers mistakenly believe the payment had failed, and thereby guiding them to scan her personal payment code to complete the payment.

Because the milk tea shop checks its accounts every day, the owner had actually discovered abnormalities in the store's revenue quite early. "I had been observing her for a long time. At first I thought I would let it go as long as she corrected herself. I neither reminded her nor talked to her about it, but later I found that she had not stopped at all and had no awareness of the seriousness of the issue, continuously misappropriating business funds."

The owner also said that he had only made public two of the many surveillance videos in his possession. He admitted that the first time the employee asked a customer to scan a personal QR code, it was not discovered in time, which may have led her to mistakenly believe that the store's surveillance cameras were just for show and that management would not frequently review the footage, making her increasingly brazen and leading her to carry out the misappropriation multiple times. At present, the store has organized all the surveillance evidence and is preparing to report the case to the police.

In addition, the owner mentioned that during the several months after this employee joined the company, "her wages were paid normally, but she had often been late before, and during holidays she would fake illness to ask for leave. Every month there were all kinds of excuses."

The reporter subsequently contacted the milk tea shop. An employee currently working there said in an interview that the employee in the surveillance video had already left the store, "She definitely knew there were cameras in the store. She knew as soon as she started working here." Regarding the former colleague's private use of a personal payment code to misappropriate the store's revenue, the other employees all said they had not noticed anything unusual before.

According to the employees, their milk tea shop operates on a shift system, generally assigning one person to the morning shift and one to the evening shift, and the working hours of the two shifts overlap, so at certain times there are multiple employees on duty in the store at the same time. When the employee involved showed customers her personal payment code, she always deliberately chose times when she was on duty alone, so the other colleagues did not know about it and could not detect the problem in time.

The milk tea shop staff told reporters that the employee in the video had been fired by the owner a few days earlier. As for the economic losses she caused to the store during her employment and how the matter would be handled afterward, the staff said the owner had not disclosed this to them, so they neither knew the exact amount of misappropriated business revenue nor whether the owner had already called the police to recover the funds.

When asked whether the person involved had done this because her starting salary was too low, the employee denied this speculation and explained, "Every employee's salary is different. She had only been on the job for a few months, so of course there is a difference compared with veteran employees."

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The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.