Patent ID: 8047434

Claim:
A method for collecting information pertaining to a defeated electronic article surveillance (EAS) tag, comprising the steps of: locating evidence of missing merchandise within an area protected by an electronic article surveillance (EAS) system, wherein the evidence of missing merchandise includes at least one of a discarded EAS tag or discarded packaging materials indicative of a missing article; providing a recording unit for collecting data pertaining to missing merchandise having at least one user interface; recording the missing merchandise data into the recording unit in response to a series of user interface prompts displayed on the recording unit, the interface prompts being programmed according to a predetermined user input sequence, the recording unit being adapted to transmit the data through a communications network; providing at least one point-of-sale (POS) station operable to record POS transaction data associated with merchandise purchases and merchandise returns; and transmitting the missing merchandise data and the POS transaction data through the communications network to a data processing unit, the data processing unit being configured to analyze the data and to generate a report which correlates shoplifting patterns based on the data.