A Spanish woman has been sentenced to six months in prison for taking the tags off new clothes she bought at Zara and putting them on older items of clothing she then returned to the store.
The woman, named in reports, as Tania M.A., 31, came up with a plan to wear Zara clothing for free in the city of Zaragoza in the north-eastern Spanish region of Aragon.
She would buy clothes in Zara shops around the city and take the tags off these new clothes, put them on older clothes that she had already worn before taking these old clothes back to the shops.
She would return the old, worn clothing and receive a refund. She is said to have worked “meticulously” on the tags, even knowing which bar codes corresponded to which shades of clothing.
She would never ask for the refunds in cash as she knew this would require a boss to authorise it, and, according to the judge, she knew the bosses’ “greater knowledge of the stock would allow them to detect that the returned clothing did not correspond to the tags”.
However, local media report she repeated the scam so many times in 15 months that staff became suspicious and reported her for fraud. She was charged with “continual fraud” and has now been found guilty, being handed a six-month prison sentence and a lifetime ban from Zara shops in the Aragon region.
The judge said: “The fact that both the interior and exterior tags matched and were precisely placed on clothing of similar colour shows the fraudulent mechanism and desire to benefit, so in that way, she renewed her wardrobe at no cost”.
Inditex, the multinational company which owns Zara, reportedly showed six fraudulent operations between October 2017 and March 2018.
As the woman has no criminal record she could reportedly ask for the prison sentence to be suspended. It is unclear if she has made this request.
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Story By: Alex Cope, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Central European News
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