How have the courts treated the issue of consent in the context of a refund fraud case?

10 The cited decisions will be relevant to a case in which a defendant is charged with theft of a refund. For example, they address and reject the contention that the store should be deemed to have "consented" to issuance of the refund because its security agent had observed the defendant's course of conduct yet had allowed or even "authorized" the refund. As the Missouri court aptly put it, "A reasonable inference would be that J.C. Penney did not and would not consent to providing a refund on an item [defendant] did not purchase and did not own. The security officer's observance did not rise to the level of consent. If we accept [defendant's] logic, retailers would be placed in the difficult position of only being able to prosecute thefts they did not observe." (State v. Wynn, supra, 794 S.W.2d 312, 315.)