You're just not going back far enough. It used to be veryeasy to return things, at least out in the midwest where I grew up.
I had budding criminal friends in high school who were no doubt partially responsible for why it became so difficult, because they were exploiting the easy returns for personal gain.
They would buy 56K USRobotics modems from Best Buy and return the boxes containing used 14K modems. Someone had found a large quantity of disused USR 14K modems, I think it was from an office building dumpster. Weekends were spent doing this across dozens of stores at scale, I never heard about any of them getting caught.
Back then your average retail employee wouldn't know a modem from a sound card. All they verified was that a circuit board computer thing was in the box.
With things becoming obsolete faster than ever before, I'm sure this scam could still work. I know plenty of stores where they only glance in the box when you return something, and if you bought it cash, you'll get cash back (no traceability).
I had budding criminal friends in high school who were no doubt partially responsible for why it became so difficult, because they were exploiting the easy returns for personal gain.
They would buy 56K USRobotics modems from Best Buy and return the boxes containing used 14K modems. Someone had found a large quantity of disused USR 14K modems, I think it was from an office building dumpster. Weekends were spent doing this across dozens of stores at scale, I never heard about any of them getting caught.
Back then your average retail employee wouldn't know a modem from a sound card. All they verified was that a circuit board computer thing was in the box.