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Pos-Miner integrates POS with CCTV

While CCTV cameras provide an overview of cashier actions, it’s the subtleties that often go unnoticed. Pos-Miner, a point of sale (POS) to CCTV integration solution, eliminates the guesswork in determining whether a criminal act has taken place.

In essence, Pos-Miner is a full POS investigation tool operating as a server/client software application which the operator uses to monitor, investigate and resolve all POS-related enquiries, disputes and investigations.

The system incorporates a sophisticated data mining engine which searches through the POS transactional data and alerts the operator to transactional anomalies, backed up by correlation to the video archive.

According to its developer, Mike Green of Sunbird Technologies and C-Video Concepts, the product was strategically developed for the South African retail market. He explains that while POS and integration to CCTV have been around for a number of years, the footage acquired at till points is of little use unless management is able to ascertain what covert actions a cashier might be taking.

Stealth Pos Gateway (SPG), a precursor to Pos-Miner, was very successful in the field but as advances in technology developed and the demand to view faster video feeds arose, the need to identify cashier-driven fraud incidents was the driver behind the development of Pos-Miner.

Pos-Miner can search for various, user-defined parameters. Green cites a couple of examples. In instances where retail stores issue loyalty cards to customers, cashiers have been known to have a third-party’s card in their possession and when a large purchase is made by a non-card holder, they simply swipe this third-party card and acquire loyalty points for the third party.

A second example is sweet-hearting, whereby a cashier covers the barcode on an item of shopping with their finger or hand as it is swept past the barcode scanner. In both instances the camera may not pick up any wrongdoing since the actions look perfectly legitimate. However, by integrating a data mining system with the surveillance footage, it is possible to determine where fraud has occurred.

Pos-Miner differs from many other similar products on the market because of its superior data mining features. Users are able to quickly and easily enter the parameters to search for specific events occurring in transactions. For instance, with the first example above if the same loyalty card number occurs on various large-amount till slips on a regular basis, this will alert the manager to an obvious anomaly. Similarly, if CCTV footage is recovered for the second instance, one can count the number of items swiped over the scanner and compare these to the number of actual items on the till slip.

By using Pos-Miner’s background workers feature, an investigation can be set for a predefined time period and the system will then filter all transactions for specific factors during the course of that period. An evidence file and full reporting will be produced overnight and the manager will be able to quickly access the required data without having to trawl through screeds of footage.

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