A 17-year-old Oklahoma boy fired from Walmart for stealing scammed the superstore out of thousands of dollars, authorities said.
"He's intelligent, he's brave ... he's very confident at what he's doing and he plays the part well," Sgt. Jeremey Lewis of the Moore Police Department told The Huffington Post on Monday.
According to Lewis, the teen, who police have not publicly named due to his age, was an employee of an Oklahoma City Walmart before he was fired for allegedly stealing money. Down but not out, the teen went to a Walmart in nearby Edmond on Black Friday, police said.
"He told them he was there from another Walmart to help with Black Friday," Lewis said. "They put him at a register. He worked for about six hours and took all the cash that he made."
The haul, authorities said, totaled about $3,000.
When the manager of the Edmond Walmart realized what happened, he notified police and the company's corporate headquarters. Local authorities launched an investigation and the retail giant sent a message to nearby Walmarts, notifying them of the alleged theft.
Despite the alert, managers at a Walmart in Moore did not recognize the teen when he showed up there in December, Lewis said.
"He presented himself as a general manager of another Walmart," Lewis said. "He said he needed to run some audits on some of the registers and on the store. He even talked to one of the customer service managers, who took him into the cash room."
While in the cash room, the customer service manager was called to assist another employee. It was during that time, Lewis said, that the teen stuffed his pants with "around $36,000." Adding insult to injury, the teen allegedly hugged the manager on his way out of the office.
Police said the caper was no small feat for a novice.
"The cash room he was in is where we go to collect returned checks and checks people have fraudulently written," Lewis said. "It's like going into Fort Knox. They don't allow anyone in that room including us, so he must have been very convincing."
The teen pressed his luck at a Walmart in Norman late last month, authorities said. That's when he was taken into custody.
"He's in jail right now," Lewis said. "He's charged with a type of grand larceny that's basically obtaining money by false pretenses. If he's charged as an adult -– which is actually what we are trying to do -- we'll release his name, the [surveillance] video and everything."
As for the cash the teen is accused of stealing -- Walmart likely won't be seeing it anytime soon.
"He's 17, so he blew it pretty quick," Lewis said.
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