[HN Gopher] Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a ca...
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Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna
(2022)
Author : nethunters
Score : 390 points
Date : 2024-01-02 09:06 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nofreelunch.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nofreelunch.co.uk)
| badcppdev wrote:
| That is absolutely disgraceful on the part of the accountants and
| programmers who should have been reconciling the cash vs sales.
| Over 13 years!
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Discrepancies in accounting are the norm, not the exception.
| _No_ large company will ever have perfectly balanced books for
| a multitude of reasons - too many different IT systems that
| sometimes but not always have the same data, humans in the loop
| that forget or fat-finger entries, inventory loss
| /theft/damage, you name it.
| hyperpape wrote:
| You're right in principle, but are they usually 20%?
| LightBug1 wrote:
| No chance! (should be the correct answer).
| Mister_Snuggles wrote:
| This is only 20% of cash fares paid at LRT stations. It
| wouldn't count those who used a bus pass, paper ticket
| (these are sold at many retailers, not just directly by
| Edmonton Transit), or those who paid on a bus and are using
| their transfer to ride the LRT.
| kvdveer wrote:
| Having your books off by a few percent is indeed quite
| common. However, missing 20% on your primary source of income
| is not the norm. If a company would report that nowadays, it
| would trigger a money laundering investigation.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| I'll bet they baselined 20% and started comparing it to the
| previous month or previous year. After many years, they
| probably established norms that accounted for this 20% loss
| unknowingly.
| whycome wrote:
| Was the cash box here the primary source of income??
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Probably not: their (1?) LRT line was just 1 chunk of
| their transit system, and systems generally have a
| weekly/monthly/student pass to uhhh, reward their
| heaviest users.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| Read up on the UK Post Office Horizon scandal if you want a
| really horrible example of this.
| function_seven wrote:
| Yeah, I immediately thought of this story as a kind of
| reverse version of that.
|
| Instead of buggy code causing innocent people to become
| criminals, here a "computer glitch" was blamed to explain
| away a signs of criminal behavior.
| nikanj wrote:
| This was decades ago, the ticket machines were not real-time
| connected to anything. It's entirely possible the numbers
| accounting used for ticket sales was the amount of cash
| retrieved from the machines, and there was no separate system
| keeping track of the tickets printed.
| badcppdev wrote:
| Good point. 1981 was a very long time ago in IT terms
| cogogo wrote:
| They likely counted the number of passengers via turnstiles
| or a gate or something. Think passenger count would be a good
| indicator of expected revenue and there would be a pretty
| clear gap. Probably one of the things the auditors noticed
| that was explained away by buggy code.
| Mister_Snuggles wrote:
| Unfortunately in Edmonton, the LRT is largely on the honour
| system. There are no fare gates, turnstiles, etc, to derive
| an accurate count from. Any passenger counts presumably
| come from statistical sampling or from checking fares as
| they exit the system (this is an occasional enforcement
| activity, not an everyday occurrence).
|
| There is a pilot project[0] to put turnstiles/gates at two
| stations, but this is to keep the homeless out of the
| stations, not to count passengers.
|
| [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/transit-
| turnstiles-o...
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Wouldn't they be able to measure the rolls of ticket paper?
|
| And mechancial counters were a thing in 1981 as well. I mean
| the machines had a way to say "you need to pay X amount" or a
| way to count money, surely that can be fed into a daily /
| weekly counter, a printed record, etc.
|
| And also, they were pretty precise with the amount that he
| stole: they can't bring a guess to court, they had an exact
| record of how much was stolen.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| If they trend it, auditors should still notice it, but
| different tickets cost different amounts, so there will be
| variability.
|
| E.g. Kids and seniors get discounts.
| refurb wrote:
| It's not their money so "meh?". Actually calling it out
| probably meant more work for them.
|
| They should have incentivized them with an annual bonus for
| reconciliation. Obviously keep the ticket and cash people
| separate (so they don't just game it to get a bonus).
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Just say it's a glitch but never write a fix ticket and it will
| hang.
| whycome wrote:
| Disgraceful? What if they didn't have adequate ridership
| numbers to use to reconcile? A lot of bus cash fares don't keep
| a rider number. And it was 1981.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| They did; the article even points out that there were two
| audits that showed the discrepancies:
|
| > _The failure to catch him, despite discrepancies between
| fares and cash raised in two audits, was put down to a belief
| that the errors were software glitches and, after his arrest,
| led to a significant amount of internal finger-pointing._
| cf1241290841 wrote:
| Wanna bet a few more people were doing this a bit higher up
| the coin stream.
| psychlops wrote:
| Complicit would be another word to consider.
| hinkley wrote:
| When you get an asshole boss, people stop defecting when they
| see others getting away with stuff.
|
| I'm not sure I could ignore outright theft. But I've
| definitely ignored - and watched others ignore - sandbagging,
| particularly when it has followed burnout.
| hinkley wrote:
| Spread out that's still $150k a year. Someone should have
| noticed >12k a month disappearing.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| > Kara was effectively stealing 20% of LRT fares over the 13-year
| period; one in five coins that were fed into the machines by the
| paying public ended up in his shaving bag, amounting to around 2
| million customer journeys. It seems inconceivable that he wasn't
| caught sooner.
|
| > The failure to catch him, despite discrepancies between fares
| and cash raised in two audits, was put down to a belief that the
| errors were software glitches and, after his arrest, led to a
| significant amount of internal finger-pointing.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The 20% could easily be missed if it ended up looking like a
| ticket wasn't sold at all (ie. just 20% fewer tickets got
| sold).
|
| Many railways don't keep track of the paper that tickets are
| sold on, because the same paper is used for printing receipts,
| seat reservations, free/discounted tickets etc.
|
| Many railways also have a double digit percentage of fare
| evasion. Also, many railways operate partially/mostly on
| government funds not ticket revenue, so a 20% loss in ticket
| revenue wasn't a 20% drop in total revenue.
| toogan wrote:
| But surely they would have a counter of how many tickets were
| sold in a machine?
| londons_explore wrote:
| I do wonder if the repairman had the ability to
| reset/twiddle with that counter...
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| It literally calls this out in the article folks.
| Leadership attributed it to a software bug and didn't
| look into it further.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| But they had a record that said how much he stole. So they
| knew how much they were supposed to earn vs what they did
| earn.
| xnorswap wrote:
| Given the Post Office / Horizon scandal, I'd actually be
| reassured the default assumption was the software was wrong.
|
| Further reading at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal , the
| TLDR is the biggest miscarriage of justice in UK history
| because people insisted the software was right.
| jaggs wrote:
| About to be the subject of a UK TV series this month.
| whycome wrote:
| Well that has the potential to be incredibly depressing. It
| will be super interesting to see how they portray the
| developers and if they call out fujitsu
| jaggs wrote:
| I really hope so. The authorities haven't even
| compensated most of the victims yet, still stalling.
| Hopefully the series will shame them into doing the right
| thing. It was disgusting what they did to these poor
| people, mostly just small mom and pop businesses who
| couldn't fight back.
| codeulike wrote:
| _Kara was effectively stealing 20% of LRT fares over the 13-year
| period; one in five coins that were fed into the machines by the
| paying public ended up in his shaving bag_
|
| This can't be right. How can one person steal 20% of the coins
| going through all the machines? Have they miscalculated the
| amount he took versus one year rather than 13 years?
| londons_explore wrote:
| If you're employed as a machine repairman, I assume you visit
| every machine pretty frequently...
| codetrotter wrote:
| Also, FTA:
|
| > maintain and fix the 68 ticket machines of Edmonton's LRT
|
| So it's not like the total number of machines is that crazy
| either.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| it's not a big system. Edmonton is a town built by oil
| money and they love their cars and trucks; it's Snow Texas.
| yreg wrote:
| Do you though? How often did these things need maintenance?
| toogan wrote:
| It would also mean that with him stealing $2.4M, their total
| proceeds over 13 years were $12M which is less than $1M a year
| to run their whole LRT.
| walthamstow wrote:
| Something doesn't add up. At his 38k CAD salary as a
| repairman, the entire budget of the LRT would pay for just 26
| repairmen? What about the drivers, electricity, maintaining
| old and buying new trains?
| toogan wrote:
| The article's author probably just messed up the math
| somewhere. According to wikipedia, there were 18,220 daily
| rides in 1978 on the Edmonton LRT. If he got $900 daily and
| that's 20%, then there were a little under $5000 proceeds
| daily, so each ride would have only brought in about $0.25.
| Detrytus wrote:
| I guess most people who ride rail frequently have monthly
| passes, only those who use it occasionally have to buy
| tickets at the ticket machine. Also, isn't 25 cents a
| reasonable price for a single ticket, given that this was
| 1981?
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I don't know about Edmonton/Alberta, but provincial and
| municipal transit in British Columbia and Vancouver (which
| is a separate entity but likely still benefits from
| provincial resources) are subsidized with taxpayer money.
| Fare collection supposedly makes up a minority of the
| funding for Vancouver's transit system.
|
| Also, with 68 fare machines in the city in 1978, how many
| repairmen do you really need?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Heh, every Toronto subway station is manned, you can
| imagine what that does to costs. Often multiple entrances
| = multiple booth staff.
|
| Going to unmanned and paying someone a premium to rapidly
| respond and fix machines 24/7 would be a massive cost
| reduction.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| We don't even have drivers for our trains in Vancouver.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Newer system. But technically with the upgrades in
| Toronto, they should be able to run driverless.
|
| Recently discontinued Scarborough Rapid Transit could
| have been driverless, but still wasn't.
|
| Toronto's will have both a driver _and_ and an on-train
| "guard" person to look out the window to make sure nobody
| is trapped in the door or something. Might get eliminated
| tho: https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/toronto-says-
| no-to-ttc...
| animex wrote:
| The scope/scale of the Edmonton LRT in 1981 was tiny...a
| single leg starting from downtown past our two stadiums
| (football & hockey) and finally to a neighborhood in the
| northeast. Primarily built to coincide with the 1978
| Commonwealth Games.
|
| From Wikipedia: The LRT system had an estimated 18,220
| weekday passenger boardings in 1978.
|
| If I remember correctly fares ranged somewhere between
| 35-65 cents in those days.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| While I also doubt the numbers, $1M in fare revenue != $1M in
| operating cost. Most public transit systems are heavily
| subsidized.
|
| That said, https://edmontonsun.com/opinion/columnists/gunter-
| edmonton-t... gives much higher numbers operating costs and
| fare revenues.
|
| > In a report released Tuesday, Wiun revealed the cost to
| operate Edmonton Transit went from $105 million a year in
| 2000 to $327 million last year.
|
| Maybe a lot of the revenue comes from transit passes and/or
| card payments and the 20% are supposed to represent only
| tickets sold for cash?
|
| Edit: Just saw the year, so you'd have to adjust that for
| inflation again too, but credit cards likely weren't a thing
| for transit passes.
| stravant wrote:
| Probably 20% of _coin fares_. Most people pay with pre-
| purchased tickets or have a transit pass.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| I would imagine this is coin payments only. Most people
| probably used transit passes. So coin payments would be a small
| fraction of the overall revenue.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| > As Kara repaid the proceeds of his scam to cover the city's
| insurers, he was released after 16 months.
|
| It's hard to find any information about this since it happened 30
| years ago, but I wonder if he had to pay a fine. If not, he
| probably made out pretty well, investing the $2 million into real
| estate.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| A curious thing here is that, if this article is correct, the man
| spent 16 months in prison, and had repaid the amount stolen by
| then. It seems reasonable to assume that if he had not invested
| his stolen money in real estate he would not have been able to
| repay his debt to society so cleanly. I wonder if in the end he
| didn't make a sizeable profit from all of this.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| This got me confused. Says he "repaid the proceeds of his scam
| to cover the city's insurers". Does that mean it was lower than
| the amount stolen and just the amount the city paid the
| insurance? So he paid the premium but not the total amount
| covered?
|
| edits: another source says he settled with the insurance
| company which implies its less than the total amount.
| toogan wrote:
| Typically when you have damages and are insured, then the
| insurance pays you and then goes after the original claim to
| get their money back. That is, the party that had the
| original damage leaves the claim to the insurance which then
| deals with getting the money back from the perpetrator while
| the original victim already got their money from the
| insurance.
|
| This also moves the risk of the perpetrator not being able to
| pay the damage. Now the victim does not carry that risk
| anymore. The insurance does. Which is their value
| proposition.
| mrtksn wrote:
| That's actually pretty common criminal activity in banking,
| where an employee will take money from accounts of clients and
| "gamble" it on high-return short term investments.
|
| Obviously I won't be naming Banks here but what usually happens
| is:
|
| 1) If they succeed in their investment they put the money back
| and walk out rich. Their venture can be detected during an
| audit some time later but if there's no money missing the worst
| that will happen is that they will be fired because banks are
| very sensitive on their reputation and they don't want people
| to hear that its possible for a such thing to happen. They also
| don't want the insurance and other regulatory bodies to hear
| about this.
|
| 2) If they are caught before returning the money(this could be
| audit, customer complaint or a whistleblower) they will be
| given the option to return the money and get fired. If they
| can't return the money, then a formal investigation and
| criminal case is initiated.
|
| 3) If they lose their investment, they will flee and trigger an
| audit. They won't be able to resign and leave gracefully
| because the process of using this money involves periodically
| putting it back at strategic times to avoid trigger an audit
| due to discrepancies, therefore it's very risky to keep coming
| back to work if you don't have the ability to put the money
| back at short notice.
|
| This is one of the reason for people in banking having
| mandatory 2 weeks time off at a time in many jurisdictions.
| Stealing needs maintenance and maintenance needs access.
|
| I also wouldn't call it "repay his debt to society" because due
| to money that he stole, he made the public transport more
| expensive and housing less affordable.
| nicgrev103 wrote:
| Isn't this literally what banks do? Take peoples deposits
| paying a minimal interest rate and then invest that money to
| earn a return higher than the interest rate they pay the
| customer (they actually will also borrow more money on the
| back of your deposit). So, when it's the bank doing it it's
| ok but a bank employee doing it independently for personal
| gain it's an issue.
|
| The book deal aspect was interesting also. So, the guy
| profits and has a potentially lucrative book deal with
| minimal jail time.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Yes but banks do it within a legal framework that moderates
| the risk(at least in theory) and people know what they are
| signing into and what are their guarantees. You don't see
| too many banks collapsing, don't you? When it happens, its
| a big deal like with the SVB earlier last year.
|
| It's also what Sam Bankman-Fried and others did in
| exchanges that acted as unregulated banks.
|
| The system is not perfect and there are many scandals but
| if you compare it to what happens in crypto exchanges, its
| a day and night difference.
|
| Running a machine as intended and screwing up is different
| from pretending doing one thing and actually doing
| something else and screwing up. This is also why bankers
| and fund managers don't usually go to jail when they lose
| clients money. It's not illegal to suck at your job as long
| as you follow the rules.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >You don't see too many banks collapsing, don't you? When
| it happens, its a big deal like with the SVB earlier last
| year.
|
| "Moderating risk" = depending on the US federal
| government bail you out?
|
| There really is no need for the charade of banks now that
| electronic databases are very solid technology. Their
| whole role in transmitting and keeping an account of
| money is surely reproducible by the federal government at
| very little cost (maybe even lower cost due to not
| needing FDIC and all that infrastructure) without having
| to pay a middleman.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Nope. It's about creating a system that attempts to
| analyse risks and invests within margins that are
| acceptable for specific products.
|
| It impossible for a bank for example to put all their
| money into Dogecoin because someone got a hunch that Musk
| will tweet about it. To do that they will need to create
| some kind of instrument that allows others to bet on
| Musks tweeting habits.
|
| > There really is no need for the charade of banks now
| that electronic databases are very solid technology.
| Their whole role in transmitting and keeping an account
| of money is surely reproducible
|
| That's not what banks do. You can do that without being a
| bank, like PayPal did. Most places will have different
| and much lightweight regulations than banks for this and
| you will go to jail if you do anything more than holding
| and transmitting customer money.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >That's not what banks do. You can do that without being
| a bank, like PayPal.
|
| Except PayPal has no FDIC protection.
|
| The part of the bank (or credit union) that required the
| US government to provide FDIC protection was due to
| dealing with cash. Imagine creating a country with just
| electronic money. What purpose would a bank with a FDIC
| protection serve if the government can just operate
| electronic money accounts itself? And if you want to take
| more risk and earn a higher return, you find a broker or
| investment fund or investor.
| mrtksn wrote:
| >Imagine creating a country with just electronic money.
| What purpose would a physical bank serve?
|
| Investing customers money, create money.
|
| Most money in the world is digital already, there are
| many banks that don't have physical presence and
| traditional banks are shutting down branches more than
| the open because branches are just the foot soldiers.
| There are also countries where cash is almost not used.
| Banks are not about cash, they are about credit.
|
| I don't know what a "physical bank" means though, AFAIk
| there's no such thing and the buildings that banks own or
| operate would serve functions like hosting
| employees/clients/systems but they might choose not to
| have some of those.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >Investing customers money, create money.
|
| And they can do this without a federal government
| backstop, just like an SP500 ETF does or a US Treasuries
| mutual fund, or an REIT, etc.
|
| My point is the federal government need not provide a
| subsidy to these businesses that "invest" customer's
| money (or simply handle the underwriting of loans in many
| cases).
|
| Right now in the US, via the Fed Funds rate, the federal
| government pays a business 5.5% just so the business then
| turns around and pays me 5.05%, all for keeping an entry
| in a database. And these businesses pay a lot of less
| discerning depositors a lot less. Surely the federal
| government can just give all 5.5% to people directly.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I wouldn't know about the legal structure you would like
| to invest your assets. Do it as you please, these things
| vary country by country too. The core concept is that you
| need to have some kind of structure for handling the
| money and a method to keep that structure in check.
|
| The problematic part starts when someone acts outside of
| this structure, like employees who take customers money
| and invest with it without explicitly having a right to
| do that.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Their whole role in transmitting and keeping an account
| of money is surely reproducible by the federal government
| at very little cost (maybe even lower cost due to not
| needing FDIC and all that infrastructure) without having
| to pay a middleman.
|
| Banks don't store money. They connect money to businesses
| in a structured way. No banks means businesses won't get
| created.
| Retric wrote:
| Fewer rather than zero businesses. Rich individuals could
| directly invest. Where banks shine is in making moderate
| risk investments which aren't worth much individually but
| are a significant economic boost in aggregate.
|
| Housing may be unaffordable, but people aren't living in
| sod houses with dirt floors and no running water either.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Going cap in hand to an angel investor for every PS10k
| loan is not viable. And they don't have the levels of
| cash needed for this.
|
| Why not use banks for this as well?
| Retric wrote:
| Get rid of Banks and many different things change.
|
| Some wealthy investors would setup a lending operation
| using their own cash, based on historical examples of
| such. They would however need to charge higher interest
| rates than banks because they would be more capital
| constrained.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I specified an (FDIC insured) bank's role "in
| transmitting and keeping an account of money". There
| would be nothing stopping a lender from lending if the US
| government gets rid of FDIC insurance and just provides
| the people of the US electronic money accounts directly.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Sure, but then what happens to the thing I said? How do
| businesses get loans? How much interest should be paid on
| that money, if any?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Supply and demand determine the price (or interest rate).
| Businesses get loans the same say any other business
| transaction happens. A buyer and seller hash out an
| agreement. This already happens all the time, even in the
| US (see investment banking).
|
| If the lender, such as a bank, is any good at their job
| of underwriting, then they won't need the federal
| government's assurance to bail them out and they will
| still be able to attract funds from people seeking
| returns (and risk).
| klabb3 wrote:
| Sounds like it could be a variation of the office space
| skit:
|
| So what would you say you _do_ here at the business
| factory?
|
| [...]
|
| I connect the money with the businesses because
| businesses are not good at dealing with money! I have
| people skills, can't you see that?
| gruez wrote:
| >There really is no need for the charade of banks now
| that electronic databases are very solid technology.
| Their whole role in transmitting and keeping an account
| of money is surely reproducible by the federal government
| at very little cost (maybe even lower cost due to not
| needing FDIC and all that infrastructure) without having
| to pay a middleman.
|
| Banks' job isn't just keeping money safe and doing
| transactions. It includes maturity transformation as
| well.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maturity_transformation
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I should have written "There really is no need for the
| charade of FDIC insured banks now that electronic
| databases are very solid technology."
|
| I am not seeing the necessity of the federal government
| backstop to these businesses.
| gruez wrote:
| > I should have written "There really is no need for the
| charade of FDIC insured banks now that electronic
| databases are very solid technology."
|
| What does this have anything to do with maturity
| transformation? Are you simply trying to say that we
| don't need banks to do maturity transformation, and they
| should stick to handling transactions?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I am saying we don't need the federal government to
| backstop businesses just so people do not "lose" money.
|
| Money is electronic, the government can handle electronic
| money accounts directly, and skip paying businesses for
| no reason.
|
| Banks or whatever other financial businesses can continue
| to sell maturity transformation services, without FDIC
| insurance.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I'm not so sure most people know what they're signing up
| for when opening a bank account. I also don't think banks
| particularly hide it, but I'd be surprised if the average
| person realizes that their checking and savings accounts
| are only IOUs or that money lent out for a mortgage
| likely didn't exist until they signed closing documents.
| mrtksn wrote:
| For all practical purposes for a customer who doesn't do
| more than putting money in, it's just a storage and they
| know how much of it is protected if something happens to
| the bank. From their point of view their money is there,
| even if the implementation details are much more
| complicated.
| _heimdall wrote:
| But the money literally isn't there, and the FDIC
| insurance that secures up to a limit is itself poorly
| funded and incapable of covering the failure of a
| moderately sized bank.
|
| Saying the money appears to be there is very different
| from the reality of it, and in the context of whether
| customers consent to how the system works its also feels
| disingenuous IMO.
|
| Can people spend the money as though it were there? Sure.
| Is the money they deposited there or are they aware that
| 90-100% of the money was immediately allocated to
| something else? Almost certainly no.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Who cares, the customers aren't exposed to all that and
| that's why they don't know it. It's like saying that
| McDonald's doesn't have any hamburgers, it's all buns and
| meat and lettuce. Yeah, that's how it works.
|
| Last year a few banks went tits up, all the deposits were
| paid.
| _heimdall wrote:
| In my opinion a more apt analogy would be McDonalds
| selling low quality food that includes ingredients known
| to very likely ve bad for your health without ever making
| that clear. Sure a customer could technically dig into
| research and health studies but that's not really the
| point here.
|
| Is it consent if you aren't made aware or given
| reasonable access to information that the average person
| could be expected to understand?
| gruez wrote:
| > FDIC insurance that secures up to a limit is itself
| poorly funded and incapable of covering the failure of a
| moderately sized bank
|
| Can you clarify what you mean by "covering the failure of
| a moderately sized bank"? Bank is almost never "all the
| money is missing". Instead, it's usually something like
| "we have assets > deposits, but they're long term assets
| that can't be liquidated immediately so we can't pay all
| the depositors right this second", or "we have assets <
| deposits, but the gap isn't big enough that FDIC can't
| handle it".
| _heimdall wrote:
| The FDIC insurance fund has been below its target reserve
| rate for years now and continues to be underfunded.
|
| At the end of 2022 the fund had $128.2 billion. I can't
| find a solid number on domestic deposits that are covered
| by FDIC based on the maximum deposit amount, but their Q2
| 2023 report showed $17.2 trillion in total domestic
| deposits across all FDIC institutions.
|
| I'd expect that more than 0.7% of all deposits are under
| the $250k deposit limit. Let's just say 30% is actually
| covered, SVB had 89% of deposits above the limit when it
| failed, the insurance fund couldn't cover the failure of
| a bank with more than 3% of the market share of deposits.
|
| The caveat there is that bank assets can be liquidated,
| but if the failure is fast enough that becomes really
| hairy. I haven't yet seen clear details on what strings
| they pulled and what sweetheart deals they gave when SVB
| was sold at the last minute, but that really means the
| fund isn't funded to cover enough and the hope really
| lies in market manipulation and a forced sale (likely
| funded in part by tax payers).
| topkai22 wrote:
| > ...checking and savings accounts are only IOUs...
|
| That are guaranteed by the US Government up to $250,000.
| While the average person may not know the details, the
| average person's faith in the banking system is well
| founded. That's why these "alt-banks", which avoid FDIC
| or NCUA coverages, are so problematic.
| ChiperSoft wrote:
| There have been 538 US bank failures since 2008.
|
| https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-
| insights...
| npteljes wrote:
| >So, when it's the bank doing it it's ok but a bank
| employee doing it independently for personal gain it's an
| issue.
|
| Yes, this is correct. The bank does it in a somewhat
| government controlled fashion, with checks and balances,
| which the world has been fighting for a millennia, if not
| more. And the guy inside does it with stolen money, for
| personal gain.
|
| Consent, for one, is a difference between the two actions,
| if we're talking morality.
| nicgrev103 wrote:
| I'm not sure how many people know this is what the bank
| is doing with their deposits, making consent difficult.
| ilammy wrote:
| Usually people don't care what the bank does because they
| consent to the government making them whole in case the
| bank fails to return the deposit.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Well, not really. Do people consent when politicians
| reallocate their taxes to bail out too "large to fail"
| institutions? Given the protests, I think not. What if
| you didn't vote for the candidate that voted in the
| bailout? What if you specifically didn't vote (or voted
| for an opponent of) that policymaker. That's actually
| _anti_ -consent
| 6figurelenins wrote:
| The concept of voting includes the possibility that a
| plurality of voters reject your preference. You consent
| to this outcome by participating.
|
| When half[1] the population refuses to participate
| (perhaps they're tired of being lied to, or the
| candidates are slime, or there are too many selectively-
| interpreted, arbitrarily-enforced "laws" to count[2], or
| the idea one person should represent 617,000 is absurd,
| or they just don't like bossing their neighbors
| around)...
|
| Maybe the government doesn't have consent.
|
| [1]
| https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/19/knight-
| non... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Co
| de#Number_and_...
| nicgrev103 wrote:
| You could use the same argument for the scammer employee
| who gambles with your money to make a personal gain. You
| implicitly consent because you consent to the government
| prosecuting injustice and returning your misappropriated
| funds.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Do you have any examples of the public being asked to
| consent before governments made banks whole after a
| failure?
| npteljes wrote:
| I believe that people have the opportunity to learn about
| banks' dealings, which is to an extent mandated by law.
| This can't be said about the person stealing the funds
| for their high-risk investment.
|
| Consent is a difficult topic though, I agree. For
| example, what choice does a person have, not use banks at
| all? I don't think that's realistic.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Have you ever tried calling your brokerage firm, if you
| own any stocks or a 401k, to ask them who owns the actual
| shares you purchased?
|
| $10 says they won't give a straight answer unless you ask
| just the right question. Eventually you'll find that
| there isn't a share you own directly, its effectively an
| IOU claim to a share. People can technically learn how
| the system works, but that leaves a lot of gray area
| there.
|
| We could also technically read medical journals and learn
| how our medications work, but its unreasonable to expect
| everyone will and recent history has shown that in a
| pinch you'll be called out for doing your own research
| and thinking critically.
| npteljes wrote:
| I'm sure I wouldn't understand their answer, even if they
| would give it to me 100% truthfully. In fact I just
| recently learned about the share IOU thing you mention
| too. And I'm somewhat interested in the topic too, so I
| too think that people in general understand it even less.
| Same for medication.
| infecto wrote:
| By no means are banks the hero in most stories but from the
| view of normal depository actions I do not believe them to
| be the villain. Banks are required to follow very specific
| rules when it comes to deposits and while yes they should
| be making a spread on the money, they are not just buying
| up risky investments with it.
| dkasper wrote:
| Not quite because it's almost backward with banks. Yes they
| take your deposits, but to the bank a deposit is a
| liability not an asset. Banks can lend out much more than
| their deposits (fractional reserve) but they technically
| don't even need deposits at all to create a loan, because a
| loan is credit (asset) and a liability to the borrower.
| This means banks in the modern sense can literally create
| money, so they don't need your deposits. You can imagine if
| no one defaults banks can balance their cash flows without
| any deposits at all, but in practice there is risk so
| deposits are more like a form of reserves more or less, and
| potentially an expensive one if interest rates are high. ht
| tps://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/022416/why-b.
| ..
| rileymat2 wrote:
| The part that is missing is that when you take that money
| to buy the thing intended with the loan the bank has to
| give you that money unless it is going to a customer of
| the same bank; impacting the fractional reserve
| requirement.
|
| As a thought experiment, if you started a bank from 0,
| how do you pay out the first loan?
|
| Yes, they create money, but deposits are a requirement to
| do it. (Unless you are doing some interest rate arbitrage
| by getting a loan from another source)
| reese_john wrote:
| > Yes, they create money, but deposits are a requirement
| to do it.
|
| Deposits, although an important source of _funding_ are
| not a requirement, _capital_ is. There are capital
| requirements that make starting and running a bank a
| fairly expensive enterprise - you need to put up a lot of
| your own money (equity) for use.
| benlivengood wrote:
| I think a primary benefit of a bank is the ability to
| borrow directly from the Federal Reserve or similar
| central government bank. The spread on interest rates
| between the central bank and consumer rates is revenue.
| reese_john wrote:
| > but to the bank a deposit is a liability not an asset
|
| Deposits are an asset AND a liability
|
| > This means banks in the modern sense can literally
| create money, so they don't need your deposits
|
| Not really. Banks still have to spend central banking
| money when doing interbank settlements, and deposits are
| an important source of _funding_ to day-to-day
| operations.
|
| Say you have an account within Chase and want to send
| money to your friend at JPMorgan, Chase can't simply
| "create dollars" - they need to have enough reserves in
| their Central Bank account.
| mempko wrote:
| To add to what you said, fractional reserve banking is
| really not a think. Many countries don't have any
| fractional requirements and in some it only applies to
| certain kinds of loans.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > So, when it's the bank doing it it's ok but a bank
| employee doing it independently for personal gain it's an
| issue.
|
| If the bank came into your home, took money without your
| consent, gambled it on high-risk activities, then tried to
| replace it before you noticed that would also be bad.
|
| But that's not what banks do. People deposit their money at
| the bank consensually and with an understanding that the
| bank's activities are regulated within relatively strict
| frameworks.
|
| I don't understand if you are trying to downplay the
| severity of criminal embezzlement by bank employees or
| trying to demonize banks, but the two scenarios you're
| equating are nothing alike in terms of consent, regulation,
| risk, and criminality.
| nicgrev103 wrote:
| It was more a curiosity driven statement. I think the
| similarity is interesting, that is all.
| stephen_g wrote:
| It's what investment banks do, but it's not how retail
| banking works.
|
| Retail banks hold their assets in various forms (central
| bank reserves, bonds etc.) but can't really 'invest'
| because they can't accept the risk.
|
| They make most of their money on lending, but can't
| actually "lend deposits" because they are on the wrong side
| of the balance sheet. The bank levers up capital (money
| that shareholders have put in as well as retained earnings
| from previous years) to lend from.
|
| Deposits do count as liquidity and are a fairly inexpensive
| form of it, which is why banks want you to move money into
| them and pay interest to encourage you to not transfer them
| out.
| mempko wrote:
| No, banks don't take deposits and invest that money. Banks
| don't loan out deposits. The opposite is true, loans create
| deposits. Banks make money off the spread in the interest
| of their loans to deposits (which are usually zero ore
| almost zero). Also fees, they make money off charging fees.
| belter wrote:
| I worked in finance and I am not aware of jurisdictions that
| mandate 2 weeks time off. Can you mention one? I am aware of
| some recommendations but I have worked up to board level, and
| never see this being more than an excuse to not miss the next
| golf tournament.
| mywacaday wrote:
| I worked in a bank in Europe that was Dutch owned and we
| were requied to take two weeks. I don't know of that was a
| company policy though.
| belter wrote:
| Sounds like these are recommendations some organizations
| can use or substitute by better methods of auditing. I
| would argue that if fraud can be covered by the presence
| of an individual, the problem is with the audit processes
| and controls in place.
|
| Plus the individual being aware of the requirement could
| easily circumvent by only stealing every quarter or every
| month :-)
|
| "Required Absences from Sensitive Positions" -
| https://www.newyorkfed.org/banking/circulars/10923.html
| oblio wrote:
| It probably wasn't. In many places in Europe it's legally
| mandated for employees to have 1 big leave per year, at
| least 2 weeks, so that they can fully unwind.
|
| https://www.codulmuncii.ro/titlul_3/capitolul_3_1.html
|
| > (5) In cazul in care programarea concediilor se face
| fractionat, angajatorul este obligat sa stabileasca
| programarea astfel incat fiecare salariat sa efectueze
| intr-un an calendaristic cel putin 10 zile lucratoare de
| concediu neintrerupt.
|
| "at least 10 working days of non-interrupted leave"
|
| Of course, this is not always enforced, but many
| countries to have it as part of the labor code.
| mrtksn wrote:
| The "mandatory 2 weeks time off at a time in many
| jurisdictions" statement might not be precise enough or
| technically accurate description of the legal status. It's
| more like "everywhere I know it's mandatory to take 2 weeks
| time off" and the mandate can come from the institution
| itself, their partners or a regulatory body recommendation
| or requirement.
| BryanBigs wrote:
| I was in investment management for a us bank - here the
| requirement is all officers must take 5 consecutive days
| off to ensure at least one weekend is covered.
| Considering I never touched money, it was one of those
| fun perks of working for a bank, like taking 2 hours of
| elder abuse classes for regulations in a state I didn't
| live nor work in, and being tested yearly all about money
| laundering laws and regulations.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| I worked at a Wall St. trading firm (albeit not in the
| trading area), and a lot of the back office/audity type
| people were required to switch roles every so often, so
| that any little unforeseen way to steal money somehow
| wasn't overlooked and "hoarded" by one person. In addition
| to multiple people having to sign off various things, etc.
|
| IIRC, there were mandatory PTO/vacations required as well,
| so that everyone's job was done by at least 2 different
| people during the year.
|
| This was not a legal thing, but required for the firm I
| worked at. My manager at the time said this was pretty
| common practice on the street, then. (Early/mid 90's.)
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup, control counts a lot! Working at IBM just our of
| college, someone several levels up was getting a
| promotion for discovering an interesting loophole.
| Apparently, he'd discovered a way that four people could
| collaborate to exfiltrate just under $25 million (several
| decades ago) on Friday, and could be out of the country
| by Monday before it was noticed. The controls were
| previously good enough that it would take no less than 4
| people cooperating. Obviously, he reported it, and this
| was good for a skip-level promotion.
| zeke wrote:
| I worked at an investment bank in the New York area.
| Employees had a two week lockout each year.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I was required at an American credit union. Having such a
| policy was a line item in state regulators' auditing, but
| not mandated to the extent that the banking charter would
| have been lost if not fully in place.
| gadders wrote:
| London? Pretty common in all banks for front office staff.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| A lot of Canadian businesses do because unused vacation
| banks are a _personal_ liability of corporate directors
| (they're treated as unpaid wages).
|
| While individuals could ask for their vacation time to just
| be paid out, a lot of employers don't like that because
| they budgeted to pay you 100% of your salary per year, not
| 104% or 106% (ie: paying you for both 52 weeks of work plus
| whatever weeks of holiday per 52 weeks).
| samirillian wrote:
| Yeah, I mean, real estate in BC (where he bought one of his
| properties) is notoriously corrupt, and lucrative. Most real
| estate bought in BC is paid in cash, often by some dizzying
| maze of LLCs or whatever the Canadian equivalent is.
| Essentially money laundering and investment rolled into one.
| sbarre wrote:
| > Most real estate bought in BC is paid in cash, often by
| some dizzying maze of LLCs or whatever the Canadian
| equivalent is.
|
| This is provably false. It's not "most" real estate, it has
| only recently approached 30% or so, and only in hot markets
| like Vancouver and Victoria.
|
| There's a money laundering problem in Canadian real estate
| for sure, but let's try to be reasonably accurate in our
| statements, shall we?
| margalabargala wrote:
| Holy cow. 5% would be high. 30% is dizzying. You're saying
| that if I pick a random recently sold BC property, there's
| a one in three chance it's bought with cash?
|
| That's not a money laundering problem, that's a money
| laundering infestation.
| sbarre wrote:
| Again, not across all of BC, but in hot markets like
| parts of Vancouver and Victoria..
|
| It sounds high but it seems to be normal enough?
|
| I found this with some quick Googling:
|
| https://www.thestreet.com/housing/a-surprising-number-of-
| hom...
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2023/
| all...
| beambot wrote:
| _1 in 3 U.S. Homebuyers Are Paying All Cash, the Highest
| Share in Nearly a Decade_
|
| Just over one-third (34.1%) of U.S. home purchases in
| September were made in cash, up from 29.5% a year earlier
| and the highest share in nearly a decade. That's
| according to a new report from Redfin (redfin.com), the
| technology-powered real estate brokerage.
|
| https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231108812516/en/
| 1-i...
| gruez wrote:
| AFAIK "Paying All Cash" doesn't necessarily mean the
| buyer has $1M (or whatever the purchase price of the
| house) saved up. It just means their offer isn't
| contingent on them securing a mortgage, and they have the
| money secured somehow (probably through a preexisting
| loan).
|
| https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/all-cash-offer-
| upfront-...
| Scoundreller wrote:
| 100%. Not unusual for a multi-property investor to buy
| "cash" through a cheque on their line of credit to close
| quickly (you've already decided you want to properly and
| quick close can be a competitive advantage).
|
| Then arrange the mortgage later, possibly after some
| capital-value improving... improvements.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Huh. Apparently it's my expectations that are wrong, not
| the market. Thanks, I learned something today!
| belter wrote:
| You could say he graduated to Banking.
|
| "Why didn't any Wall Street CEOs go to jail after the financial
| crisis?" - https://features.marketplace.org/why-no-ceo-went-
| jail-after-...
| Waterluvian wrote:
| He likely paid interest on the money too. That interest is part
| of what he stole.
| sherlock_h wrote:
| Too bad it doesn't say how he actually got found out. I imagine
| he could have gotten away with it if he had gradually reduced his
| theft of coins over 2-3 years, then quit the job and moved
| somewhere else. I'm pretty sure there's tons of schemes like this
| that aren't ever found out.
| toogan wrote:
| > Too bad it doesn't say how he actually got found out.
|
| Hm? It does:
|
| > In 1993, with the red flags mounting up, the city authorities
| hired private investigators to observe Kara, which finally
| caught him in the act.
| whycome wrote:
| That's fairly vague though. What red flags? How were they
| novel?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Probably the 19th audit in a row where ridership and fare
| enforcement stats didn't match up to fares paid.
| forinti wrote:
| A quick Google didn't return any books on this, unfortunately.
|
| What stood out for me was that the Canadian tax authorities
| didn't get to him. Maybe he payed tax on his earnings; the
| article doesn't clarify.
| toogan wrote:
| Is not paying tax on income from theft actually tax fraud?
|
| I mean, the theft itself is obviously unlawful. But perhaps you
| wouldn't be taxed on theft proceeds anyway, so no tax laws are
| broken in that case.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Yes income from illegal activities is still taxable income in
| most parts of the world.
|
| Edits, thinking about it...the article says he claimed the
| money was from his business. And the bank took in the money.
| So perhaps he did pay tax?
| toogan wrote:
| How do you report it? Is there a field "income from illegal
| activities" in the tax forms? Asking for a friend.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Sometimes. When there isn't, there's a directive to enter
| it under "other income" or something similar.
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.1407698
|
| Depending on the seriousness of the crime, the taxman may
| or may not be able to share those details with law
| enforcement.
|
| I think the cutoff is _if_ the sentence could be for 14
| years, they can share it.
|
| When Canada legalized marijuana, they made many
| infractions punishable by _up to_ 14 years. So if you
| sell unlawful marijuana to a minor, you could get 0 to 14
| years in prison. As a result, many illegal marijuana
| sellers will require ID to avoid this (dunno if they're
| paying taxes or not, but makes sense to care about this
| if they are).
| renewiltord wrote:
| https://www.irs.gov/publications/p525#en_US_2022_publink1000.
| ..
|
| For the US, yes.
| forinti wrote:
| Even if it weren't, I'd suppose that the CRA would want to
| know how he came about the money in order to attest if it was
| really exempt.
| rocqua wrote:
| Generally the end goal of money laundering is to have the money
| be taxed. Because at that point the money looks very
| legitimate, and a big part of the government (the tax office)
| stops trying to catch you.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| His salary, in real terms, was pretty good by the way. Way more
| than I earned as a software dev for many years.
| refurb wrote:
| I noticed that too.
|
| $38k in 1981 in Edmonton was firmly middle class.
|
| Plenty of homes cost less than $100k. Rent was in the $100-300
| per month range for a nice 2 bedroom.
|
| Dude just got greedy. If he had skimmed $600 per week instead
| of $3000, he would have doubled his take home pay and likely
| never would have been caught. It would have amounted to almost
| $100k every 3 years which is a tidy sum back then.
| xpe wrote:
| > Dude just got greedy.
|
| It seems to me that once a person builds an illegal habit, it
| demonstrates they: (a) probably have a higher risk tolerance
| than most people and/or an inaccurate understanding of the
| empirical risk level and/or (b) they have, perhaps only
| temporarily, found a self-interestedly-rational aspect of
| law/society to exploit.
|
| Once one's behavior crosses into that realm, "dude just got
| greedy" seems to miss the point. It was greed that got them
| there, right? How many _optimally_ greedy criminals are
| there? I don 't claim to know, but I'm suggesting that risk-
| adjusted _optimality_ and the criminal mind are not highly
| correlated.
|
| Anyhow, it doesn't seem the 'level' of greed was the problem;
| it was the level of _spending_ ; the article suggests that
| Kara's lifestyle upgrade attracted considerable attention.
|
| More generally, the risk-adjusted calculus between "steal a
| lot quickly" vs "steal a lot slowly" is interesting. First,
| being a repairman of said machines, he would be a suspect if
| _any_ discrepancy was found. Second, dragging a larger-than-
| usual bags of coins to the bank for years seemed rather
| brazen. But perhaps the consistency of his behavior made it
| seem 'normal' to the local bankers? Putting both together,
| sure, larger amounts would attract more attention, but the
| relationship between intake and risk is probably not linear.
| As a guess, one might think halfing his intake might only
| reduce his risk by 10%. If so, a self-interested, amoral
| calculus might suggest that his intake was reasonable.
| refurb wrote:
| All good points. But there is also an element of "if they
| haven't caught me now, they won't ever". Risk tolerance
| increases over time.
| toyg wrote:
| _> How many optimally greedy criminals are there?_
|
| I don't know, how big is Wall Street nowadays? /s
|
| More seriously: it's likely that there are indeed a lot of
| "optimally greedy" criminals - it's just that we don't
| label them criminals, because they don't get caught. I
| guess the actual numbers are somewhat dependent on your
| trust in the ability of law enforcement.
|
| _> perhaps the consistency of his behavior made it seem
| 'normal' to the local bankers?_
|
| Perhaps it was just the '80s, when banks didn't really
| _want_ to ask any questions.
|
| _> the relationship between intake and risk is probably
| not linear._
|
| I agree there. Note that criminals do tend to understand
| this, typically regarding the results of conviction. It's
| the reason capital punishment is not really a deterrent:
| because once you pass the threshold (which is often with a
| single act), punishment does not grow prportionally, so
| they might as well do it over and over.
| genman wrote:
| He could have stopped stealing when he wanted to have a
| more lavish life style and they wouldn't be have been able
| to catch him (at least not red handed).
| Scoundreller wrote:
| If they improved their auditing and revised their models,
| they might get suspicious if dude quit and their revenue
| suddenly went up 25%.
|
| Or not ask any questions at all and get big bonuses...
| rsynnott wrote:
| > How many optimally greedy criminals are there?
|
| Bernie Madoff might be close to an example; his scheme kept
| going for an _amazingly_ long time, and he made some effort
| at times to reduce inflow to keep it somewhat under
| control. There was probably a world in which it only came
| out after he died; as it was he was kind of unlucky with
| the timing.
|
| Of course, there might be plenty of optimally greedy
| criminals out there, and you'll never know; more or less by
| definition they do not get caught.
| avidiax wrote:
| The best part of Bernie Madoff's grift, in my opinion, is
| that it follows the notion that "you can't cheat an
| honest man".
|
| No one had any legitimate idea for how Bernie could beat
| the market by such an amount and so consistently, and yet
| they still invested. They must have thought that he was
| insider trading or suspected that it was a Ponzi. Roughly
| half his investors made money by cashing out, which is
| not something you'd usually do if you thought the fund
| was legitimate.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| He did make the "classic, amateur, movie thief" mistakes of
| spending lavishly and stealing a large fraction of coins
| that couldn't be covered simply by driving a crappy '77
| Chevy Malibu. (That was a particularly ugly car with bad
| paint. [0] My parents had a '78.)
|
| This is the idiocy of committing various forms of graft or
| embezzlement in the Western world: the rewards are small
| and short-term compared to the nonzero legal and financial
| consequences of getting caught. It's that most people are
| bad at quantifying the probabilities and qualitatively
| assessing their risk exposure before they're caught and
| rationalizing they're different and somehow smarter than
| everyone else at all times. _His theft didn 't go unnoticed
| and they eventually had to hire a private detective _
|
| Even if someone could steal much quickly the equivalent of,
| say, a billion dollars without raising any suspicion or
| leaving any trace evidence and launder it covertly, the
| problem becomes there is no country to disappear to where
| the proceeds could be utilized and where property rights
| are respected: countries including Iceland, Switzerland,
| Ecuador, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, Belarus, Afghanistan,
| Iraq, Iran, Qatar, Yemen, China, and DPRK will not help
| you. One could attempt to live openly, but they would find
| it difficult to launder their funds from nowhere into the
| legitimate banking world without inevitably raising
| suspicions or being caught through forensic accounting.
|
| Therefore, a wise criminal(tm) is generally better off
| using legitimized means to facilitate large-scale wealth
| transfer from people and organizations that lack economic
| and political power using trickery, obfuscation, and
| complexity. Either that, or by creating genuine (or
| genuine-appearing) value and monetizing it well through
| work that doesn't involve criminality reduces the risk of
| ending up poor and/or in prison. Apart from specialized IP
| or knowledge work ability that can be productized as a
| startup, the areas of real estate, public markets, and
| fintech are the most obvious targets for non-lifestyle
| business models. Other non-/semi-lifestyle business models
| readily achievable by an individual is becoming a B2B
| supplier of high-value, high-margin specialized goods that
| present one or more barriers to entry, i.e., aircraft
| parts, nuclear energy parts, safety systems, or medical
| devices.
|
| 0. https://topclassiccarsforsale.com/chevrolet/288637-1977-
| chev...
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I'm surprised Canadian coins are magnetic, though my two minute
| research says the loonie isn't? Apparently it was redesigned
| around 2000, maybe it switched then.
| toogan wrote:
| There is a sizeable community doing so called "magnet fishing".
| Check out r/magnetfishing
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Coins don't seem to be their target, as very few seem to be
| magnetic.
| toogan wrote:
| Hm, true. But I sometimes see people walking along beaches
| doing this kind of thing. Though they're probably hoping
| for rings (gold, silver, diamond, ...) rather than coins,
| which would make it much more lucrative as well.
| klyrs wrote:
| Gold, silver, and diamond are also non-magnetic.
| evan_ wrote:
| Passing it off as proceeds from a vending machine business was
| smart, I wonder if he actually had a fleet of vending machines to
| make that plausible. Of course you'd need to be able to show
| receipts for cost of goods sold... money laundering is hard!
| toogan wrote:
| Hm, what about vending machines with things you make yourself,
| legitimately without any paper trail that would show what you
| are making?
| evan_ wrote:
| And ideally the deliverable would be something digital rather
| than tangible so your COGS are effectively zero... like a
| bitcoin ATM for instance... hm
| rgmerk wrote:
| It doesn't sound like he did.
|
| Laundromats would have been ideal for this kind of, well, money
| laundering. In a pre-digital era, who's going to check that the
| number of cycles on the washing machines line up exactly with
| the takings?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| An auditor or private investigator, but granted, there's a
| lot of room for tax evasion - there's a reason a lot of
| businesses and contractors will gladly take cash, tax evasion
| being one, most digital transaction costing them money being
| another. It's fairly common in my country (NL) to see signs
| saying "please pay in cash" and "EUR0.25 surcharge if paying
| with debit card for amounts below EUR20"
| yurishimo wrote:
| Around where do you live? Anecdotally, I don't see much of
| any of that in Eindhoven or the surrounding villages.
| planede wrote:
| Correlating with water and electricity bills could raise
| suspicion, but yeah, it's probably harder.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Maybe? Pre-digital machines would keep no tamper-proof
| record of usage. And a good variety of machines in your
| laundromat (with varying appetites for water and
| electricity) could discourage all but the most fanatical of
| auditors.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I wonder how he explained (or if he ever had to) that his
| weekly haul, deposited at the bank, apparently doubled when the
| looney coin was introduced ?
| eschneider wrote:
| Having an actual fleet of vending machines would be an
| excellent cover for such a scam, but even if they're
| unprofitable, you still need do do some amount of work to
| maintain that cover. Soon, the cover story becomes an actual
| 'job' and you have to wonder if you're pulling in enough cash
| with the crime to rationalize it.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| If anyone asks, tell them the receipt comes out if they shake
| it!
| walthamstow wrote:
| It's amazing how far you can get in crime by not driving a flash
| car and just generally keeping a low profile
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Only necessary if you keep your job. If you don't, there are
| plenty of places you can live very nicely without having to
| explain where all that money came from.
|
| Your neighbours will be too afraid you'll wonder the same
| question about them.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| And the only one you may need to explain yourself to is
| taxes; I have (had) colleagues working at the tax office,
| they're working on machine learning algorithms to detect
| suspicious activity on bank accounts (because the tax office
| has full access to everyone's transaction history, of
| course). They focused on suspicious repeat transactions, but
| I'm sure they will at some point focus on a suspicious
| absence of transactions, e.g. no grocery purchases.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| That's cool. Canada implemented some kind of suspicious
| financial transaction agency thing only in 2000 (to stop
| money laundering and TerRoRiSM) and just issued its first
| fines to banks this year.
|
| While large volumes of transactions have been reported, the
| agency mostly... well, took reports!
|
| It can be a hard nut to crack and I don't think governments
| actually want to find and stop the transnational kind money
| laundering.
| woobar wrote:
| _(because the tax office has full access to everyone 's
| transaction history, of course)_
|
| In what country? It maybe possible for tax agency to
| request access to the transaction history in case of the
| audit, but I doubt they just get a feed of all
| transactions.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Yes, although depositing so many coins at the bank each week
| that they are having to let you in the back door isn't exactly
| low profile behavior!
|
| LTR's record keeping/monitoring must have been abysmal if they
| didn't realize the sudden drop in revenues when they hired this
| guy, unless the person he replaced had been doing the same !
| taspeotis wrote:
| (2022)
| ben_w wrote:
| Interesting. A litte after that time, aged 13-14, I was
| interested in coin pusher machines[0], which (despite being
| gambling) were not age restricted where I lived. Obviously I
| wanted a way to do better than the system allowed and wanted to
| know if I could use magnets to pull the coins towards me[1]; some
| research showed that some "coppers"[2] were magnetic and others
| weren't, and that it seemed to depend on the date the coin was
| stamped.
|
| Although I can't remember now if the older or the newer coins
| were the magnetic ones, I wonder if the composition was changed
| in part due to this case?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_pusher
|
| [1] No
|
| [2] British slang for 1 and 2 penny coins due to colour
| toogan wrote:
| > Obviously I wanted a way to do better than the system allowed
| and wanted to know if I could use magnets to pull the coins
| towards me[1]
|
| In other words, you wanted to cheat. I can't comment on whether
| that's fraud in a legal sense, it's still cheating.
| ben_w wrote:
| Like most teenagers, I grew up.
|
| There's a reason 13-14 year olds aren't held to the same
| standards as adults.
| mft_ wrote:
| That's an interestingly hard line to take.
|
| The game in question --the penny pusher-- pits a player's
| skill against the (the design of the) game, and (probably)
| allows a skillful player to earn a greater return. The game
| is inherently designed to restrict winnings, and (so goes
| urban legend) the owners can restrict winnings further by,
| for example, gluing coins to the base in certain areas.
|
| I'd therefore argue that exploiting gaps or flaws in the
| game's design are just an example of a especially skillful
| operator beating the game and its designers, and not
| cheating. The line between clever exploitation and outright
| theft is a probably difficult one to draw; although turning
| up with a giant electromagnet which just pulled the coins
| straight off the shelf, would probably be over that line :)
| ajb wrote:
| The newer 'coppers' are magnetic, so I doubt it. The reason was
| because they were becoming more expensive to make than their
| face value. Anyway you couldn't steal a significant amount in
| coppers, the main debate is whether to get rid of them
| entirely.
| ben_w wrote:
| > the main debate is whether to get rid of them entirely.
|
| Now, yes. But this was the 90s. You could still (just about)
| buy some items for a single penny back then.
| ajb wrote:
| Fair enough. Still, PS2M in copper would weigh about 700
| tonnes.
| tyingq wrote:
| I don't think the 1980's loonies were steel, they appear to
| have been mostly nickel.
|
| I suspect though, that some detail of the various ways he did
| this just got lost over time. You could probably fish them out
| with superglue or sticky mastic on the antenna rather than a
| magnet, for example.
|
| Or maybe the magnet was always used to hold some kind of trap
| door open rather than directly fishing the coins.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Article says loonie came out and implemented in their system
| in 1988. Before that it was mostly quarters. Both were nickel
| based which is ferromagnetic.
|
| Loonies are coated in a different metal making them less
| magnetic, but stronger magnets will fix that.
| joncrocks wrote:
| Newer 'coppers' are magnetic, older ones are not.
|
| https://www.royalmint.com/stories/collect/why-are-some-uk-co...
| - the composition of 1p and 2p coins was changed from bronze to
| copper-plated steel in 1992 and the composition of 5p and 10p
| coins was changed from cupro-nickel to nickel-plated steel in
| 2011
| refurb wrote:
| In the words of Ace Rothstein in the movie Casino.
|
| _" You can spot these assholes by watching the way they bet.
| Like this guy. He 's bettin' lavender chips at five hundred each
| with only one little problem. He's always guessed right. If he
| wasn't so fuckin' greedy, he'd have been tougher to spot. But in
| the end, they're all greedy."_
| Bluecobra wrote:
| This story reminded me of the payphone bandit, James Clark, who
| stole about $500k picking the payphone locks during the 1980s.
| Had he kept a lower profile, payphones eventually became
| obsolete and he might have gotten away with it.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Shortly before they became obsolete, payphones over here
| switched to pre-paid cards, which made them less convenient /
| ad-hoc to use and may have contributed to their decline
| (mobile phones being the obvious one of course).
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > In 1981, Kara was hired on a $ 38k-a-year salary to maintain
| and fix the 68 ticket machines of Edmonton's LRT - light rail
| transit system.
|
| If that was their 1981 salary, that's damn impressive.
| paulluuk wrote:
| Indeed, that's about $117k (CAD) per year in 2023. (80k euro,
| 88k usd)
| Scoundreller wrote:
| While interest rates were sky high then, internets say a
| detached bungalow in Edmonton cost $82k then, but about the
| same 10 years later.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| they sure ain't 82k now. $482k for somewhere near the LRT
| might be a good start
| dmix wrote:
| It was a technical job and union.
|
| Looking at a similar job in Toronto they make $80-100k today
|
| https://career17.sapsf.com/career?career%5fns=job%5flisting&...
| mkl95 wrote:
| > Remember, every coin has two sides
|
| Unless his coins were microscopically thin, three sides would be
| more accurate
| blackoil wrote:
| Three surfaces. Infinite side or two depending on your position
| on how many edges a circle has.
| paulluuk wrote:
| If the coin is perfectly circular, is does in fact have only 2
| sides (as a perfect circle has no sides). If the coin is not
| perfectly circular, but is (at some microscopic level) full of
| edges, it could have a near infinite amount of sides.
| function_seven wrote:
| A perfectly cylindrical coin would have three sides: 2 flat
| planes and a curved ribbon. No reason a "side" has to be
| flat. Just ain't got no internal edges!
| 4hg4ufxhy wrote:
| Can there be more sides than atoms on the surface?
| blep_ wrote:
| Trivially yes: how many sides does one atom have?
| drgo wrote:
| He got away too easy if you ask me. You will need to spend a
| miminm of 2 years in jail for owning not stealing 500 cannabis
| plants
| Dah00n wrote:
| By that logic, you are also stating that you see two years in
| jail "for owning not stealing 500 cannabis plants" as a fitting
| punishment, no? Seems to me one is fine while the other is too
| high.
| lolc wrote:
| If we take cannabis legislation as a guideline for other laws,
| farming as an occupation faces a grim future.
| typon wrote:
| He gave a bunch of the money back
| JeffSnazz wrote:
| The impulse to punish other minor infringers more rather than
| to fix obviously antisocial draconian punishment will never
| cease to mystify and befuddle me.
| chimen wrote:
| Used to do that with public phones as kids in communist Romania
| in mid 80s. Ate a lot of icecream.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| > He removed the face plate from the ticket machines, which as a
| repairman would raise no suspicion, then rigged a car antenna
| with a magnetic tip, like a make-shift fishing rod. Coin-by-coin,
| Kara hooked his catch out of the ticketing machine cash box into
| a shaving bag, which acted as his keep net.
|
| I can't picture how his rig worked, the article would have
| benefitted by anything visual help :/
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| Here's a typical metro ticket machine
|
| https://lrt.daxack.ca/Cities/Minneapolis/hires003.jpg
|
| The coin slot is in the top right. As Kara
| only maintained the machine function, he didn't have
| direct access to the cash box where the coins were
| collected after customers had fed them to purchase LRT
| tickets. He removed the face plate from the ticket
| machines, which as a repairman would raise no suspicion
|
| His job would have included duties like resetting the machine
| if it locked up, removing jams for receipts and ticket
| printers, loading new thermal paper and cardstock for printed
| receipts and tickets, etc. Things you would expect someone
| dressed in company maintenance attire to be doing.
|
| Ultimately what I think happened is that, behind the faceplate,
| the opening for the coin box is larger than the coin slot on
| the faceplate, possibly for tolerance reasons to ensure that a
| coin passing through the faceplate always lands into the coin
| box. This gap was enough to get an antenna down into with a
| magnet attached to the end.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It sounds like the cash boxes had an open slot he could just
| fish coins out of with a magnetic tipped car antenna. You can
| get things like that ready-made these days for fishing things
| out of tight spots.
| aaron695 wrote:
| It'll be fake and he just broke in, maybe legally it was better
| to not have 'broke' anything but this was how he started it
| all.
|
| Do the napkin math -
|
| 1. There was no AliExpress to get amazing magnets from, and
| there were no amazing magnets.
|
| Average of $3k / week
|
| $3000 / 6 days working / 8 hours = $62.5 per hour
|
| Personally I get rid of lower coins into machines. So lets say
| 4 coins to get $1. He's pulling out 200 coins a hour? And doing
| his job. And no one sees him pulling up and down 4 time a
| minute for hours on end?
|
| -------------------------------
|
| Segway -
|
| On the evening of Sept. 29 1994, Constable Ken Chatel, a member
| of the RCMP Customs and Excise Section in Edmonton leaned back
| in his chair to catch the six o'clock news.
|
| One of the items that evening covered a police search of the
| home of Salim Kara, a city transit employee who was charged
| with stealing in excess of $2 million dollars from Light Rail
| Transit coffers.
|
| As the camera panned the interior of the opulent residence on
| Osborne Crescent, several objects caught Chatel's eye and made
| him lean forward with renewed interest.
|
| The camera revealed two zebra skins on the walls and a
| threefoot carved tusk in a display cabinet. Depending upon the
| species of animal each item represented, it was possible that
| they were protected by international legislation.
|
| https://www.gamewarden.ab.ca/agwmagazine/1996/summer%201996/...
| Scoundreller wrote:
| $1 coins were common in Canada for most his operation.
|
| Excellent magnets available inside any speaker, just crack
| off a piece of the length you need. Basically free.
| hinkley wrote:
| I can't picture how you stand there long enough to steal
| thousands of dollars per week without anybody noticing for 13
| years.
| kodt wrote:
| He did it in the middle of the night
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Probably nothing else to do other than listen to the radio.
| Dude probably kept the machines in tip-top shape because it
| made them more money that way while reducing the total
| amount of work required.
| thedougd wrote:
| Sounds like he used a common telescoping magnet tool, typically
| used by mechanics for picking up dropped screws, nuts, and bolts.
| An "antenna with a magnet on the end" is an accurate description.
| mkjonesuk wrote:
| Reminded me of this great American Dad episode:
| https://americandad.fandom.com/wiki/Meter_Made
| codelikeawolf wrote:
| Excellent episode! One of my favorite scenes is Stans first
| day, when he meets the guy who trains him:
|
| > My wife can barely look me in the face.
|
| > Mine looks me in the face and more because she knows I'm on
| these mean streets every day juggling power and justice like
| they were damn chain saws.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| " Sooner or later, the temptation to spend became too much and
| maybe thinking he would never get caught in 1992, Kara decided to
| trade up from his modest $136,000 home to something much more
| fitting of a vending-machine millionaire."
|
| Well... what's the point of stealing money if you can't ever
| spend it?
| toyg wrote:
| As anyone who watched The Wire knows, thanks to Stringer Bell's
| pitch to Marlo Stanfield, _" they turn your things against you,
| that's how they get you"_.
|
| Conspicuous consumption is bound to trigger alarms. The smart
| wealth makes itself as invisible as possible, and typically
| plans generational succession instead.
|
| If you really want to enjoy your riches, you better build all
| sorts of deniability layers first, or do it as part of
| retirement from the game. If this guy had dismantled the hack,
| left the job and retired to a Florida mansion, he wouldn't have
| been caught.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Or moved abroad where they wouldn't ask questions; the
| challenge then is moving a lot of money across the border
| without customs asking questions. This is where
| cryptocurrencies have probably come in very handy, although,
| buying cryptocurrency using coins is probably difficult, lol.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Or you just move someplace where there's no extradiction
| agreement with the country where you committed the crime.
| Look at Ronnie Biggs, one of the "Great Train Robbery"
| culprits from the UK who then lived for years in Brazil.
| rsynnott wrote:
| There's a wide gulf between a $136k house and a house that
| literally has an _indoor fountain_, if you're trying to be
| somewhat discreet.
| codeulike wrote:
| Stealing 2 million, one coin at a time, over 13 years, mostly at
| night, by waggling a magnetised car antenna through a small slot
| for hours and hours, is actually hard work. Its like the opposite
| of The Shawshank Redemption.
| breischl wrote:
| Digging a tunnel through a rock wall with a tiny hammer over
| years, as in The Shawshank Redemption, seems very similar.
|
| Both sound like a lot of work though.
| nsajko wrote:
| Missed the joke.
| theptip wrote:
| The direction of travel relative to jail is the opposite
| though.
| hinkley wrote:
| There was that couple in New England where the husband figured
| out there was a lottery ticket that was nearly guaranteed to
| return a slight profit if nobody won the previous couple of
| weeks.
|
| Several articles were written about them, I think I saw an ad
| for a movie even, but it took both of them working very long
| days to pull this off, including standing in convenience stores
| for hours at a time pushing buttons. I think they ended up
| making less than $100 an hour between them.
|
| Which is a better job than many people can get, but if you're
| retirement age in a job you can actually retire from, then this
| is more about Sticking It to the Man than about getting rich.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| That was a calculated bet though, where the expected value
| was known to the positive, but you'd need to buy as much as
| possible to guarantee your outcome each time that situation
| happened.
| robterrell wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_%26_Marge_Go_Large
| dmix wrote:
| It's not necessarily one coin at a time, a strong magnet could
| pull multiple, which means you could make $3-4 in a few seconds
| once you mastered it. Push it in so it bends down, pull out,
| drop into the shaving bag, insert again, etc. He probably had a
| lot of time to work on each box.
| cush wrote:
| Luckily for him, Canada has a $2 coin. If he tried this in the
| US, he'd only make $250k
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| When money becomes a target, it fails to be a good money?
| macshome wrote:
| As an American, the part of the story that is very interesting to
| me is that Canadian coins have enough ferrous content to be
| picked up by a magnet. Wouldn't the ability for coins to become
| magnetized cause all sorts of issues for the internal workings of
| vending machines and other coin slot using mechanisms?
| whycome wrote:
| Looks like all current Canadian coins can be picked up -- $1,
| $2 .25, .05, .10. (couldn't test pennies as Canada hasn't had
| them for a while).
|
| I suspect US quarters would have the same makeup
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| US quarters cannot be picked up by magnets.
| whycome wrote:
| Interesting that they exist interchangeably in all vending
| machines, etc in Canada.
| toast0 wrote:
| Canadian vending machines are happy to accept US quarters
| at par. Why pay for a more sensitive mechanism to prevent
| someone from giving you a more valuable coin. Although,
| probably not more valuable enough that it's worth
| filtering out from change boxes to deposit with a US
| based bank instead.
|
| Otoh, there are coin mechanisms that can check for and
| reject quarter sized objects that are attracted to
| magnets; they might not be installed everywhere that
| takes US quarters, but if an operator starts getting a
| nuisance amount of CA quarters, they will be. See this
| doc [1] for a description of a pretty discerning
| mechanism (although it accepts both US and CA quarters, a
| slightly different design could reject CA quarters)
|
| [1] http://segalandassociates.com/Documents/Coin-
| Mechanisms_Slug...
| shadyfroyo wrote:
| American coin mechanisms in vending machines and arcade
| games have magnets to filter out Canadian quarters.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I thought all coin mechanisms use magnets to
| differentiate coins, no?
|
| A coin drops at a known speed and the right coin will get
| pulled by the right amount by a magnet or get rejected.
| smachiz wrote:
| Not in the US - I think they use diameter and weight.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Sounds like slug heaven. But I guess if they don't take
| $1 coins, it's not as worth it finding a washer that will
| go where a quarter goes.
| alexbock wrote:
| It sounds like you're thinking of separating coins using
| eddy current braking [1]. This works even for non-
| magnetic coins because the effect is a function of the
| metal's electrical conductivity.
|
| If you have a silver coin or a small piece of copper pipe
| and a large, strong neodymium magnet, then you can easily
| observe this effect at home by putting the metal sample
| on a table and quickly waving the magnet past it as close
| as you can without touching it. The metal will slide
| across the table following the magnet, despite the metal
| itself not being magnetic, because the moving magnet
| induces eddy currents which temporarily create a magnetic
| field like an electromagnet. Other metals besides silver
| and copper exhibit weaker responses due to higher
| electrical resistivity.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_current_brake
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Thanks for explaining. Wondered how non-ferro coins were
| handled.
|
| TD Bank in Canada had coin counting machines for
| customers for a while. I dumped a few hundred $ in and
| was very happy when it kicked back some silver coins to
| me.
|
| How nice of them!
| andy99 wrote:
| Pretty interesting table here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
| Penny_(Canadian_coin)#Composit...
|
| I had thought pennies were made of zinc towards the end but
| that was only for a couple years. Then they were made of
| steel which should be magnetic.
| dubcanada wrote:
| We have tons of vending machines, and coin slots and I've never
| had or heard of such a problem? Completely anecdotal but still.
| berkes wrote:
| IIRC many vending machines operate or operated on the magnetic
| properties of coins even. At least in my country before the
| Euro some did.
|
| There are only several properties that can be easily
| distinguised from coins without complex digital processing:
| weight (and its distribution), sizes, conduction and
| ferromagnetism.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| As an American, the part of the story where a single coin is
| valuable enough to bother with is very interesting to me. Our
| failure over years to introduce a working dollar coin (much
| less a toonie) is frustrating.
| ac29 wrote:
| This was 40 years ago and he was stealing hundreds of coins a
| day.
|
| Also, I'm sure you realize, but the US has had dollar coins
| since at least 1971. The public never really had much
| interest in using them and with cash use declining, I wouldnt
| expect that to change.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I didn't read the "failure to introduce" as meaning no coin
| was created, but more as "failure to launch" in that it was
| just never picked up by the population. My largest concern
| with the dollar coins where they were too similar to
| quarters in size and were often used in error as a quarter.
| it is the primary reason I've heard to explain the lack of
| acceptance.
| wredue wrote:
| The coins don't work unless you stop production of, and
| start reclaiming the bill variant.
|
| Nobody wants to carry change, so of course they favour the
| bill rather than the coin.
|
| Canadians didn't have much interest in carrying the toonie
| either, but had no choice in the matter.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| You're right, I do realize!
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| If they were fishing quarters, they'd have a $44k in "side
| income". The coin's value ultimate doesn't matter if you're
| willing to steal 500 of them every single day.
| dghughes wrote:
| Making $17/hr in 1994 is equivalent to $31/hr in 2023.
|
| Then again it was Alberta so even minimum wage workers were
| probably making $17/hr back then since housing costs would have
| been nuts, or anything really.
| codelikeawolf wrote:
| He was making $17/hr in _1981_ , which is over $58/hr in 2023.
| I imagine he probably got raises, although they probably didn't
| match inflation.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I'm thinking they had to be a licensed electrician for the
| job (there's AC behind that panel, oh no, you could touch the
| wrong wire and DiE!!!1).
|
| Lots of demand throughout the 70s for electricians in
| Alberta.
|
| I hope anyway...
| anonu wrote:
| Reminds me of the salami slicing technique in the movie Office
| Space.
| abkolan wrote:
| As a non US/Canada based reader reading the article, I had a hard
| time grokking the article without visuals of how this was pulled
| off.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Coin goes down slot like a vending machine hitting some sensor
| telling the machine that a $0.25 or $1 coin has been accepted.
| Dumb old machine has poor protections against reversing that
| process, especially with faceplate removed.
| StayTrue wrote:
| Lots of confusion here about what such a meter actually looks
| like. See the start of this [0] document for a photo. It's an
| older photo but I remember the same from Edmonton in the 1980s.
| No digital display, no thermal printer, etc. They were numerous
| -- one meter for each parking spot. Later in the subject's tenure
| they were swapped for digital display/timer meters with the same
| form factor (still no printer).
|
| https://pub-edmonton.escribemeetings.com/filestream.ashx?Doc...
|
| Edit: disregard -- this doc is for parking meters rather than LRT
| machines (which the article also calls LTR).
| hn8305823 wrote:
| In GTA Vice City one of the first ways you can make money
| outside of missions is to sneak over to the main island, run
| over parking meters downtown and collect the money. It doesn't
| take long to collect enough to buy the cheap shack residence
| downtown, which is conveniently near the police helipad.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| That's a parking meter though.
|
| I think this guy snagged money from the light rail transit
| ticket/token system.
|
| Funny how parking meters can be somewhat standardized,
| meanwhile every transit system seems to want to design/build
| its own solution.
| StayTrue wrote:
| You're right!
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I did a quick google search, and this is what the LRT ticket
| machines looked like in 1988:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
| sirmike_ wrote:
| No my dear Kara. Coins have three sides. Can't forget the edge.
|
| "Before his sentencing in March 1996, Kara made an enigmatic
| statement in court, promising at some point to share his side of
| this fascinating tale "Remember, every coin has two sides"
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I did a quick google search, and this is what the LRT ticket
| machines looked like in 1988 (which includes the period in
| question):
|
| https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
| ilamont wrote:
| Skimming from public transit is an old trick.
|
| There was case like this in Boston about 15 years ago that came
| to light as they were switching away from tokens to Charlie
| Cards. It was an MBTA mechanic. IIRC he was caught because it
| looked strange that someone kept showing up with bags of tokens
| to exchange for cash at one of the stations.
|
| Even with the new card system, someone figured out a scheme to
| steal:
|
| https://www.universalhub.com/2011/mbta-revere-man-made-sold-...
|
| And when I was a kid there was a big parking meter scandal in
| which most of the collectors were implicated after a resident saw
| two of them skimming. Loved this quote from the investigator:
|
| _' 'The meters in Boston are the oldest I've ever seen,'' Mr.
| Vitagliano said. ''In some cases, it is actually easier to take a
| quarter out of one of our meters than to put a quarter in. I mean
| that.''_
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/08/us/boston-meter-collector...
| Scoundreller wrote:
| That's nothing, in Canada we had a guy steal half point (200g)
| gold nuggets... internally... from the Mint. Only got caught
| when he deposited lots of big cheques from a gold coin shop at
| his bank and they learned he worked at the Mint.
|
| https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/royal-canadian-mint-emp...
|
| In 2015, this fellow was making $55k/yr, contrast to the guy in
| the article making $31k in 1981.
| andy99 wrote:
| The 38k/year was the most striking part of the article.
| According to a (US) inflation calculator that would be 130k
| today https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ which seems very
| good for an apparently entry level job.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I wonder if the fellow had to be a licensed electrician for
| that job. It would explain a lot, especially in Alberta
| where they were in high demand throughout the 70s to work
| the oil patch.
| cstejerean wrote:
| I think that's largely because wages haven't really kept
| pace with inflation.
| phonon wrote:
| It's a Canadian dollar, so about 20% less or so than USD at
| that time.
| JackFr wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/08/nyregion/tunnel-vision-ki...
|
| Token sucking - described by police as the most disgusting non-
| violent crime committed on the NYC subway.
| subpixel wrote:
| I recall seeing that happen on one occasion and thinking,
| you've earned it.
| avidiax wrote:
| https://archive.ph/CtpVe
| foooorsyth wrote:
| In Boston in the '90s and early 2000s, an out of order parking
| meter meant you could park for free. There was a sensor in the
| coin slot to detect jams which would in turn put the meter out
| of order. If you ripped off the flip up lid from a Dunkin
| Donuts coffee cup and inserted it into and removed it from the
| coin slot, the meter would go out of order. It was almost as if
| that's what the Dunkin engineers designed it for. It worked
| every time.
|
| Many a cold morning in Boston my father would prefer to pay the
| $1 for his Dunkin coffee than pay for parking as we ran errands
| in the city. A trail of disabled meters laid in our wake. Not
| the best lesson for 8 year old me but a funny memory
| nonetheless. RIP Dad.
| FrankoDelMar wrote:
| My father used to do this too in Boston, but instead by
| jamming the slot with some kind of paper past the point of
| removing it. Extra points for using the orange colored
| envelope you got with your last parking ticket. Definitely
| was not a good lesson for a similarly aged me.
| foooorsyth wrote:
| > My father used to do this too in Boston, but instead by
| jamming the slot with some kind of paper past the point of
| removing it
|
| This is why the Dunkin flip up lid was such a technological
| innovation: my dad was worried that he'd get reported by a
| meter maid if they continuously found his junker purple
| Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight (out of place in the Back Bay) in
| front of meters with obvious and visible paper jams. The
| Dunkin lid did just enough to permanently trip the jam
| sensor while also being removable _and_ reusable. It gave
| you just enough plausible deniability. For a while there he
| just kept one in his center console instead of bothering
| with change machines.
|
| >Extra points for using the orange colored envelope you got
| with your last parking ticket
|
| Nothing worse than seeing that neon orange envelope under
| your wiper blade from afar when returning to your car.
| Those meter maids were like ninjas.
| c1sc0 wrote:
| I'd argue that it is a very good lesson for that age ...
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| For years San Francisco had a major problem with city employees
| and contractors stealing the money from the meters.
|
| https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/robbed-blind-parking-cza...
| ben30 wrote:
| Reminds me of a lesser-known story from the Falklands War. On the
| HMS Sheffield, there was a civilian laundry worker. When the ship
| was struck and sank, he tragically drowned, reportedly burdened
| by a large number of PS1 coins he carried from laundry payments.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| P: _This sounds familiar._
|
| M: _Yeah... they did it in Superman III._
|
| P: _Right._
|
| M: _What a good movie, actually. And then a bunch of hackers did
| it in the 70s as well and one of 'em got busted._
|
| P: _Well, so they check for this now._
|
| M: _No, here 's the thing. Initech's so backed up with all the
| software we're updating for the year 2000, they'd never notice._
|
| P: _You 're right. And even if they wanted to, they couldn't
| check all that code._
|
| M: _Thumbs up their asses. Thumbs up their asses._
|
| P: _So, Michael, what 's to stop you from doing this?_
|
| M: _It 's not worth the risk, I got a good job._
|
| P: _What if you *didn 't* have a good job?_
|
| Edit: All of the publicly available scripts and quotes were
| wrong. Checked the original source. ;@]
| rsynnott wrote:
| > an indoor fountain
|
| His fatal mistake. Anyone with an indoor fountain is obviously up
| to _something_.
| CodeSheikh wrote:
| Is this the infamous magnet-bandit?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salim_Kara
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Common sense points to "unlikely" since there's a filmmaker and
| other untold namefellows, just like anyone else. I suspect the
| real SK keeps a low profile.
| huytersd wrote:
| I doubt it but it would be a testament if it was this guy and
| he used a small public transport "seed fund" to start a postage
| empire.
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