Credit card fraud - rewards for stopping fraud

A friend who worked on credit card security told me that a retailer's staff who spots and retains a stolen or fake credit card is given a reward of $50. If the credit card holder is detained, the reward is $200. However, this information was provided quite some years ago, so the rewards may now be higher.

A word of caution - detaining a suspected crook carries some risk. It the detention is not justified, a lawsuit for false imprisonment might well be started against the employee and his employer. A lawyer friend and his pregnant wife were once wrongly detained for shoplifting of a briefcase. Although he produced a receipt, this was not accepted. The retailer feared that he had bought one item, then went back to steal an identical item using the first receipt. He later settled his false imprisonment claim with the department store for $800.