What would work is that consoles read the barcode too. Stolen barcode = console banned for life. Just like piracy.
^^ not to mention hardware sales will drop severely, and/or a disgruntled good-guy to blow the security apart. (like the engineer on the film 'brazil' doing free jobs, wiring the utilities to customers for free just to stick it the the man) anything and everything can be cracked, it's a matter of expertise, resources and time, just those. ... can't say i trust this idea of renting, if there's NO human intermediary between separate customer transactions, it was bound to happen i guess. the cheap bastards clearly want rid of any regulations and human help to the end of $$$ profits. (old fart here: the more i think about it the more i see clear. if users buy into this and becomes a known standard, expect further repercussions. ignore the village crazy at own peril!)
The person that stole the disc is an idiot. Credit Card transactions will show history. Good that you reported it.
Yes credit cards could be traced, however I would wonder if certain Visa/MC/Amex giftcards could be used much like scammers used to "social engineer" the PS4 and Xbox One's right after launch? Then it would be basically untraceable beside CCTV surveillance. Not suggesting for anyone to do it, crime is crime, just wonder how more people aren't caught if it was as simple as looking to who last rented it.
As I recall, Redbox doesn't accept pre-paid cards. Credit or Debit only. So I think we can rule out that method. I still think the issues lies in that they know something happened with the disk, but they don't if the previous person did it, or the person claiming the disk was stolen did it.
The answer to this question is that (if the next person that rents the item reports it) they ban the credit card that was used to get the disc in the last time it was rented. They trace the last known renter and ban it. They don't even investigate it, it's just banned. Even their free rental codes that they give out require you scan a card just in case you don't return it on time. The theft of a $60 item may not be worth it because they can never again use that card in any redbox ANYWHERE. But they find that out the hard way. I know this because it happened where I lived in Kansas and this was the biggest news story the local news had to go with. They did mention you can call and dispute but theres never enough evidence to prove that you DIDN'T do it.
There is nothing really stopping you from renting a disc, take it home, photocopy it, call up and say there was no disc. They would just instantaneous the last renter.. also rebox probably have quaddroplediezesd the cost of the disc by the time someone steals it.. Also I can garantee that redbox don't pay full price for any game or movies. They'd just roll up to a big media distributer (say allinteractive) and be like " eeyy.. If you's guys can get us a disc only copy of halo 4, wezes will take 10,000 of em, at a good price too.. Ain't I right boys"....
That sounds like a big margin for retail.. I'm only a small business so I get standard rates which are usually $3 less than srp.
Walmart/Target/Gamestop/Redbox, etc buy thousands, maybe for big games tens or hundreds of thousands of copies, they get a better rate. No offense, but I doubt you're getting 100,000 copies of Halo 5
I had a friend who was a manager at Gamestop and that was their rate. I can't speak for the other large game retailers but I imagine Target/Best Buy/ Walmart wouldn't be much different.
