Fifty-one percent of car dealers have been victims of employee embezzlement, theft, or fraud.
Headlines show what can happen when the wrong employees are hired:
- “Car dealership accountant indicted for stealing over $200,000.”
- “Former exec accused of $745K theft from dealership.”
- “Employee admits to embezzling over $1 million from dealership.”
- “CFO embezzles close to $10 Million over a 7-year period.”
A basic criminal background check and annual rechecks – along with suspicious activity monitoring – can help reduce the chance crime with employees in the automobile business.
These steps – along with treating the dealership as a true business and not a family run enterprise -can elevate the employee applicant pool. This then has the potential to stop job seekers with criminal pasts from becoming trusted employees, whose deceptive goal is to do financial and reputational harm to automobile dealer and/or their customer.
Scamming a Car Dealer’s Customers
Last year, a woman who worked at a used auto dealership in St. Louis scammed the car dealer’s customers for $89,000.
It is not known if the employee underwent any pre-employment screenings or if she had previous history of theft on her record.
But basic pre-employment background checks uncover not only previous crimes, but give you better candidates to choose from, potentially scaring away applicants with criminal histories they do not want potential employers to discover.
The $1 Million Auto Dealer Employee Fraud
Do a couple of employees wake up one day and decide that over the next year they are going to defraud their car dealership employer, a financial institution, and the federal government out of nearly $1,000,000?
It appears there was lot of planning that went into this fraud, and the employees most likely had committed a similar crime previously at another dealer. They felt comfortable executing their plan and committing the fraud, while continuing to come to work every single day. The fraud WAS their job.
A criminal background check initiated by the employer, through a screening company like Five Diamond Screening – that includes reference checks, employment history, social media searches, and other proprietary search methodology – at the very least could have acted as a gatekeeper, and potentially kept these employees from setting up shop at the unsuspecting auto dealership.
Five Diamond Screening, a Las Vegas-based background screening company, makes it easier to improve the quality of your job applicants with background checks that include screenings for criminal histories. If you are a car dealer in need of pre-employment screenings, we can put together a cost effective, efficient, and fast process that helps you to protect your business and your customers.
Let’s chat.
