Boca Raton Target Employee, 31, Jailed in $41K Cash Theft Scheme

Abdulkader “Abdul” Ahmed (Photo: Palm Beach County Jail)

An employee at the Target store in unincorporated Boca Raton was taken into police custody Tuesday following a lengthy investigation that found he allegedly stole more than $41,000 from the big box retailer – a case that drew an elaborate probe from Target’s national loss protection division as well as the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.

Those investigations, which began in October 2025, led authorities to look into Abdulkader “Abdul” Ahmed, 31, of Deerfield Beach, a team leader at the store on SR-7 (U.S. 441) in Boca Raton. They began after the store’s management identified “a series of unusually high nightly cash shortages: that consistently appeared only on shifts closed by Ahmed, a police report filed in Palm Beach County Circuit Court said. The pattern was both abnormal in frequency and significant in dollar amount, prompting immediate concern from store leadership.

Loss Prevention investigators, who first identified the discrepancies, noted that the shortages repeatedly aligned with Ahmed’s cash-handling duties, including his responsibility for retrieving register bags, transporting the store’s cash cart, and performing end-of-night cash- related tasks. Because these losses seemed to be occurring exclusively under Ahmed’s supervision and no other employees exhibited similar shortage patterns, Target’s National Investigations Center initiated a formal internal probe.

Target Asset Protection authorized the installation of a covert surveillance camera inside the store’s cash office on Oct. 3, 2025 to discreetly monitor all cash-handling procedures performed by Ahmed and to determine whether the shortages were the result of theft, mishandling, or procedural violations, the report said. Once active, the covert surveillance “immediately captured suspicious activity consistent with theft,” it went on to say.

In a statement from the investigative team to sheriff’s deputies, on multiple recorded occasions, Ahmed was allegedly seen entering the cash office with the cash cart, opening register bags, removing U.S. currency, and then concealing the stolen cash inside his boot, pant leg, or pocket before exiting the room.

“These concealment actions were deliberate and included rolling up his pant leg, stuffing occupation retail currency into his boot, and carefully adjusting his clothing to hide the stolen money,” the report said. “When combined with the corresponding register shortage reports, the footage revealed a consistent and intentional pattern of theft occurring across numerous dates in both September and October.”

The report alleges that the first significant theft captured on video occurred Oct. 7, 2025 at approximately 3:37 p.m., when Ahmed was observed “counting a stack of bills before placing them into his pocket.” Minutes later, he allegedly removed additional $100 bills and concealed them in the same fashion, then clocked out and exited the store shortly afterward. Two days earlier, on Oct. 5, 2025, he “collected cash from multiple registers and entered the cash office at 10:19 p.m.,” according to the report. The covert camera allegedly recorded him “rolling up his jeans, removing cash from register bags, and stuffing the bills into his boot before resuming normal activity and leaving the store at 11:29 p.m. with the stolen money.”

The report chronicled several similar incidents dating back to September 2025, each of which resulted in the loss of between several hundred dollars and several thousand dollars, with a maximum of about $3,400 at a time. The $41,000 figure was supported through “multiple sources, including over/short reports, daily shortage summaries, and documented acts of concealment captured by video surveillance,” the report stated, adding that other cashiers and employees working at the same time were cleared of any wrongdoing.

The report said that Target ultimately provided a written confession from Ahmed to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, in which he allegedly admitted the thefts and expressed regret, saying they were motivated by personal financial debt issues.

Charges were filed by the state’s attorney’s office in December, leading to the arrest of Ahmed Feb. 17, 2026. He was charged with grand theft between $20,000 and $100,000 and fraud to obtain more than $20,000. He was being held at the Palm Beach County Jail in lieu of a combined $80,000 bond.