Can you make this stolen phone work for me?

The Wal-Mart I work at is real ghetto. And when I say ghetto, I mean G-H-E-T-T-O!

We've had people run confidence games in the aisles of electronics, steal purses right out of carts, customers attack cashiers right at their registers and on at least four occasions weed has come wafting out of the front restrooms. Every morning we gather up all of the empty boxes from stolen items and it fills up a ten-gallon storage bin. That's ghetto.

The worst part about the stealing is that the people doing the stealing are sometimes not that educated about what they are stealing. For instance, the pre-paid cellular phones.

Even though there are labels all over the things that say "NOT ACTIVE UNTIL SOLD" and "SCAN AT REGISTER FOR ACTIVATION" people steal the things all the time. I guess you have to have a phone — even if it doesn't work — to look "street."

So these three toughs walk in with a kid in tow and they have the kid do the talking. The story is that "grandma" bought the kid the pre-paid cell phone "for Christmas" but that "someone" forgot to activate the phone at the register, so could we please activate the phone so the poor boy could use his Christmas present that grandma got him? And of course because it is a gift from the mysterious but oh-so-generous "grandma," they don't have a receipt.

Grandma doesn't exist. The phone was never legally sold in the first place. There is no way that phone ever got onto a receipt without being activated. No way, no how. You cannot scan the barcode and not scan the activation code. But still, can you call them liars? What can I do?

I have to return the phone as a return without a receipt, so I get a drivers license on at least one of the toughs, and then re-sell the phone, activating it.

I hope that phone give those guys brain cancer.