PORTLAND, Ore. – A Toys R Us employee got a bit carried away with the season of giving and wound up in jail for letting customers leave the store without paying for merchandise, according to court documents.
Chelsea Frye, a Toys R Us clerk, was arrested on a warrant Wednesday morning. Court document say she’s accused of letting customers walk out of the store with free merchandise because she wanted them “have a better Christmas.”
A Toys R Us asset protection manager first notified Portland police on Nov. 21, 2017 that an employee at the Jantzen Beach location was suspected of theft.
The manager said he had been investigating some of Frye’s transactions and discovered that on Nov. 15, Frye processed four transactions in a row, and then deleted them all from her register.
As a result, the four customers left with merchandise that totaled $2,981.42.
Then again, on Nov. 16, the manager said Frye scanned and then deleted 20 items from her register, allowing the customers to leave with unpaid merchandise totaling $985.79.
On Nov. 18, Fry processed a transaction for a customer that included three Playstation 4 video game consoles and one Xbox 1 video game console, as well as several other items.
She claimed her register “crashed” after this transaction, which allowed the customers to leave with the unpaid items that totaled $2,869.77. She then moved to another register, processed 42 items and then deleted 35 of them. This allowed this customer to leave with $1,162.63 worth of unpaid merchandise.
She also processed a transaction for five, $500 prepaid Visa debit cards. She took a personal check from the customer, did not check ID and entered in another manager’s authorization number to process the transaction. This resulted in a loss of $2,524.75.
Toys R Us asset protection members interviewed Frye and she wrote a written statement apologizing for allowing some of the customers to leave with unpaid for merchandise. She said she felt bad for the customers and wanted to “help people have a better Christmas.”
When a police officer interviewed Frye, she said all the transactions were the result of a register error or people trying to take advantage of her generosity. She admitted she knows all the people involved in the suspected transactions.
But, she was unable or unwilling to give police the customers names.
Fry was arrested on multiple theft charges, computer crime charges and an identity theft charge.
She is also booked in the Multnomah County Jail on two second-degree trespassing charges.
(KATU News 2 contributed to this report.)