Systems (100) and methods (1100) for activating an Electronic Article Surveillance ("EAS") element deactivator. The methods involve: obtaining customer-related data from a customer of a business organization who is attempting to deactivate an E AS element of at least one item; obtaining transaction data contained in a receipt issued upon completion of a checkout transaction for the customer; communicating the customer-related data, transaction data and a unique identifier for an EAS element deactivation system to a remote computing device; processing the customer-related data and transaction data to obtain confirmation that the customer has recently successfully completed the checkout transaction for the item and the EAS element of the item has not yet been deactivated; and activating the EAS element deactivator of the EAS element deactivation system subsequent to when the confirmation is obtained.