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Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)

426 points by nethunters 3y ago

quickthrower2 3y ago
His salary, in real terms, was pretty good by the way. Way more than I earned as a software dev for many years.
- refurb 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    > 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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
      > 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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        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 3y ago
      > 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.
walthamstow 3y ago
It's amazing how far you can get in crime by not driving a flash car and just generally keeping a low profile
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  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_ 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
      (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 3y ago
4gotunameagain 3y ago
[flagged]
- toogan 3y ago
  [flagged]
Yarbterry 3y ago
[dead]
badcppdev 3y ago
That is absolutely disgraceful on the part of the accountants and programmers who should have been reconciling the cash vs sales. Over 13 years!
- psychlops 3y ago
  Complicit would be another word to consider.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    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.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    You're right in principle, but are they usually 20%?
    - LightBug1 3y ago
      No chance! (should be the correct answer).
    - Mister_Snuggles 3y ago
      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.
unsupp0rted 3y ago
[flagged]
- londons_explore 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    But surely they would have a counter of how many tickets were sold in a machine?
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      I do wonder if the repairman had the ability to reset/twiddle with that counter...
      - Topgamer7 3y ago
        It literally calls this out in the article folks. Leadership attributed it to a software bug and didn't look into it further.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    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 3y ago
  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 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.
codeulike 3y ago
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?
- toogan 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        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 3y ago
      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?
ipsum2 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
  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.
sherlock_h 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
    That's fairly vague though. What red flags? How were they novel?
    - Scoundreller 3y ago
      Probably the 19th audit in a row where ridership and fare enforcement stats didn’t match up to fares paid.
forinti 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
  - dennis_jeeves2 3y ago
    >Is not paying tax on income from theft actually tax fraud? Well tax on income is theft ( my opinion). So tax on theft income would be theft on theft. Life sure is complicated ;)
  - thinkingemote 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      How do you report it? Is there a field "income from illegal activities" in the tax forms? Asking for a friend.
      - Scoundreller 3y ago
        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 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).
boomboomsubban 3y ago
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 3y ago
  There is a sizeable community doing so called "magnet fishing". Check out r/magnetfishing
  - boomboomsubban 3y ago
    Coins don't seem to be their target, as very few seem to be magnetic.
    - toogan 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        Gold, silver, and diamond are also non-magnetic.
        boomboomsubban 3y ago
        Metal detectors, which is what they were describing, find metal that isn't magnetic.
evan_ 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Hm, what about vending machines with things you make yourself, legitimately without any paper trail that would show what you are making?
  - evan_ 3y ago
    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 3y ago
  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_ 3y ago
    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 "€0.25 surcharge if paying with debit card for amounts below €20"
    - yurishimo 3y ago
      Around where do you live? Anecdotally, I don't see much of any of that in Eindhoven or the surrounding villages.
  - 3y ago
taspeotis 3y ago
(2022)
ben_w 3y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_pusher [1] No [2] British slang for 1 and 2 penny coins due to colour
- toogan 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
    Like most teenagers, I grew up. There's a reason 13-14 year olds aren't held to the same standards as adults.
  - mft_ 3y ago
    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 :)
- 3y ago
refurb 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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_ 3y ago
    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 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  Indeed, that's about $117k (CAD) per year in 2023. (80k euro, 88k usd)
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      they sure ain't 82k now. $482k for somewhere near the LRT might be a good start
- behnamoh 3y ago
  [flagged]
- dmix 3y ago
  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&company=TTCPRODUCTION&navBarLevel=JOB%5fSEARCH&rcm%5fsite%5flocale=en%5fUS&career_job_req_id=8753&selected_lang=en_US&jobAlertController_jobAlertId=&jobAlertController_jobAlertName=&browserTimeZone=America/New_York&_s.crb=1Jac9HMQr500Ud9wdRcW8FwcBM2JSdW8y1xli%2fOUApE%3d https://career17.sapsf.com/career?career%5fns=job%5flisting&...
- dennis_jeeves2 3y ago
  Put another way, the current generation of earners have a raw deal. High inflation, high cost of housing etc. etc. Oh, Canada!
mkl95 3y ago
> Remember, every coin has two sides Unless his coins were microscopically thin, three sides would be more accurate
- blackoil 3y ago
  Three surfaces. Infinite side or two depending on your position on how many edges a circle has.
- paulluuk 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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!
    - paulluuk 3y ago
      Depends on whether a "side" is an "edge" of a "face" in geometry terms. An edge must be two-dimensional (so flat), a face can be three-dimensional (like a curved ribbon).
  - 4hg4ufxhy 3y ago
    Can there be more sides than atoms on the surface?
    - blep_ 3y ago
      Trivially yes: how many sides does one atom have?
drgo 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
  - drgo 3y ago
    I said no such thing... I was just pointing out that financial crimes (especially those deemed clever) are less severely punished than far less than criminalized behaviour that often does not hurt anyone
- lolc 3y ago
  If we take cannabis legislation as a guideline for other laws, farming as an occupation faces a grim future.
- typon 3y ago
  He gave a bunch of the money back
- JeffSnazz 3y ago
  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 3y ago
Used to do that with public phones as kids in communist Romania in mid 80s. Ate a lot of icecream.
tiborsaas 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  Here's a typical metro ticket machine https://lrt.daxack.ca/Cities/Minneapolis/hires003.jpg 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_ 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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/archds7.htm https://www.gamewarden.ab.ca/agwmagazine/1996/summer%201996/...
thedougd 3y ago
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 3y ago
Reminded me of this great American Dad episode: https://americandad.fandom.com/wiki/Meter_Made https://americandad.fandom.com/wiki/Meter_Made
- codelikeawolf 3y ago
  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 3y ago
“ 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 3y ago
  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_ 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Missed the joke.
  - theptip 3y ago
    The direction of travel relative to jail is the opposite though.
- hinkley 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
  - 3y ago
macshome 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    US quarters cannot be picked up by magnets.
    - whycome 3y ago
      Interesting that they exist interchangeably in all vending machines, etc in Canada.
      - toast0 3y ago
        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-Rejector/Coinco_790.pdf http://segalandassociates.com/Documents/Coin-Mechanisms_Slug...
    - 3y ago
google234123 3y ago
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- whycome 3y ago
  A curious case here. Which country should he have been deported to?
  - networkchad 3y ago
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dghughes 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
Reminds me of the salami slicing technique in the movie Office Space.
abkolan 3y ago
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.
- deleted 3y ago
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- Scoundreller 3y ago
  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 3y ago
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?DocumentId=8062 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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    You’re right!
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  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.it%2Frv59vprbgyp51.jpg%3Fwidth%3D624%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Df902751fdaf76698598138f0d2d6d21013590568 https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
sirmike_ 3y ago
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 3y ago
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.it%2Frv59vprbgyp51.jpg%3Fwidth%3D624%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Df902751fdaf76698598138f0d2d6d21013590568 https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
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lyzwd 3y ago
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ilamont 3y ago
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-millions-dollars-worth-u 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-collectors-charged-with-coin-theft.html https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/08/us/boston-meter-collector...
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  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-employee-convicted-of-theft-after-smuggling-out-162k-in-gold-nuggets-inside-his-butt/wcm/5a76dae2-ce56-420d-9326-918f58cb9725/ 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 3y ago
    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/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ which seems very good for an apparently entry level job.
    - Scoundreller 3y ago
      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.
ben30 3y ago
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 £1 coins he carried from laundry payments.
- deleted 3y ago
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DarnyEscoba 3y ago
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1letterunixname 3y ago
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 3y ago
> an indoor fountain His fatal mistake. Anyone with an indoor fountain is obviously up to _something_.
CodeSheikh 3y ago
Is this the infamous magnet-bandit? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salim_Kara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salim_Kara
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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.
amelius 3y ago
This was before surveillance cameras were at every corner of every street.
MaryGab 3y ago
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jackmurphy2117 3y ago
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426 points by nethunters 3y ago

quickthrower2 3y ago

His salary, in real terms, was pretty good by the way. Way more than I earned as a software dev for many years.

refurb 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    > 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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
    > 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.

walthamstow 3y ago

It's amazing how far you can get in crime by not driving a flash car and just generally keeping a low profile

Scoundreller 3y ago
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_ 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    (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 3y ago

4gotunameagain 3y ago

[flagged]

toogan 3y ago
[flagged]

Yarbterry 3y ago

[dead]

badcppdev 3y ago

That is absolutely disgraceful on the part of the accountants and programmers who should have been reconciling the cash vs sales. Over 13 years!

psychlops 3y ago
Complicit would be another word to consider.
- hinkley 3y ago
  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.
mschuster91 3y ago
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 3y ago
  You're right in principle, but are they usually 20%?
  - LightBug1 3y ago
    No chance! (should be the correct answer).
  - Mister_Snuggles 3y ago
    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.

unsupp0rted 3y ago

[flagged]

londons_explore 3y ago
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 3y ago
  But surely they would have a counter of how many tickets were sold in a machine?
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    I do wonder if the repairman had the ability to reset/twiddle with that counter...
    - Topgamer7 3y ago
      It literally calls this out in the article folks. Leadership attributed it to a software bug and didn't look into it further.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  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 3y ago
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 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.

codeulike 3y ago

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?

toogan 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
    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?

ipsum2 3y ago

> 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 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
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.

sherlock_h 3y ago

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 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  That's fairly vague though. What red flags? How were they novel?
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    Probably the 19th audit in a row where ridership and fare enforcement stats didn’t match up to fares paid.

forinti 3y ago

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 3y ago
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.
- dennis_jeeves2 3y ago
  >Is not paying tax on income from theft actually tax fraud? Well tax on income is theft ( my opinion). So tax on theft income would be theft on theft. Life sure is complicated ;)
- thinkingemote 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    How do you report it? Is there a field "income from illegal activities" in the tax forms? Asking for a friend.
    - Scoundreller 3y ago
      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 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).

boomboomsubban 3y ago

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 3y ago
There is a sizeable community doing so called "magnet fishing". Check out r/magnetfishing
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  Coins don't seem to be their target, as very few seem to be magnetic.
  - toogan 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      Gold, silver, and diamond are also non-magnetic.
      - boomboomsubban 3y ago
        Metal detectors, which is what they were describing, find metal that isn't magnetic.

evan_ 3y ago

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 3y ago
Hm, what about vending machines with things you make yourself, legitimately without any paper trail that would show what you are making?
- evan_ 3y ago
  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 3y ago
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_ 3y ago
  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 "€0.25 surcharge if paying with debit card for amounts below €20"
  - yurishimo 3y ago
    Around where do you live? Anecdotally, I don't see much of any of that in Eindhoven or the surrounding villages.
- 3y ago

taspeotis 3y ago

(2022)

ben_w 3y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_pusher [1] No [2] British slang for 1 and 2 penny coins due to colour

toogan 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  Like most teenagers, I grew up. There's a reason 13-14 year olds aren't held to the same standards as adults.
- mft_ 3y ago
  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 :)
3y ago

refurb 3y ago

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 3y ago
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_ 3y ago
  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 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
Indeed, that's about $117k (CAD) per year in 2023. (80k euro, 88k usd)
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    they sure ain't 82k now. $482k for somewhere near the LRT might be a good start
behnamoh 3y ago
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dmix 3y ago
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&company=TTCPRODUCTION&navBarLevel=JOB%5fSEARCH&rcm%5fsite%5flocale=en%5fUS&career_job_req_id=8753&selected_lang=en_US&jobAlertController_jobAlertId=&jobAlertController_jobAlertName=&browserTimeZone=America/New_York&_s.crb=1Jac9HMQr500Ud9wdRcW8FwcBM2JSdW8y1xli%2fOUApE%3d https://career17.sapsf.com/career?career%5fns=job%5flisting&...
dennis_jeeves2 3y ago
Put another way, the current generation of earners have a raw deal. High inflation, high cost of housing etc. etc. Oh, Canada!

mkl95 3y ago

> Remember, every coin has two sides Unless his coins were microscopically thin, three sides would be more accurate

blackoil 3y ago
Three surfaces. Infinite side or two depending on your position on how many edges a circle has.
paulluuk 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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!
  - paulluuk 3y ago
    Depends on whether a "side" is an "edge" of a "face" in geometry terms. An edge must be two-dimensional (so flat), a face can be three-dimensional (like a curved ribbon).
- 4hg4ufxhy 3y ago
  Can there be more sides than atoms on the surface?
  - blep_ 3y ago
    Trivially yes: how many sides does one atom have?

drgo 3y ago

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 3y ago
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.
- drgo 3y ago
  I said no such thing... I was just pointing out that financial crimes (especially those deemed clever) are less severely punished than far less than criminalized behaviour that often does not hurt anyone
lolc 3y ago
If we take cannabis legislation as a guideline for other laws, farming as an occupation faces a grim future.
typon 3y ago
He gave a bunch of the money back
JeffSnazz 3y ago
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 3y ago

Used to do that with public phones as kids in communist Romania in mid 80s. Ate a lot of icecream.

tiborsaas 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
Here's a typical metro ticket machine https://lrt.daxack.ca/Cities/Minneapolis/hires003.jpg 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_ 3y ago
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 3y ago
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/archds7.htm https://www.gamewarden.ab.ca/agwmagazine/1996/summer%201996/...

thedougd 3y ago

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 3y ago

Reminded me of this great American Dad episode: https://americandad.fandom.com/wiki/Meter_Made https://americandad.fandom.com/wiki/Meter_Made

codelikeawolf 3y ago
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 3y ago

“ 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 3y ago
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_ 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
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 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Missed the joke.
- theptip 3y ago
  The direction of travel relative to jail is the opposite though.
hinkley 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
- 3y ago

macshome 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  US quarters cannot be picked up by magnets.
  - whycome 3y ago
    Interesting that they exist interchangeably in all vending machines, etc in Canada.
    - toast0 3y ago
      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-Rejector/Coinco_790.pdf http://segalandassociates.com/Documents/Coin-Mechanisms_Slug...
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google234123 3y ago

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whycome 3y ago
A curious case here. Which country should he have been deported to?
- networkchad 3y ago
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dghughes 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago

Reminds me of the salami slicing technique in the movie Office Space.

abkolan 3y ago

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.

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Scoundreller 3y ago
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 3y ago

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?DocumentId=8062 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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  You’re right!
Scoundreller 3y ago
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.it%2Frv59vprbgyp51.jpg%3Fwidth%3D624%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Df902751fdaf76698598138f0d2d6d21013590568 https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

sirmike_ 3y ago

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 3y ago

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.it%2Frv59vprbgyp51.jpg%3Fwidth%3D624%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Df902751fdaf76698598138f0d2d6d21013590568 https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

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lyzwd 3y ago

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ilamont 3y ago

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-millions-dollars-worth-u 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-collectors-charged-with-coin-theft.html https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/08/us/boston-meter-collector...

Scoundreller 3y ago
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-employee-convicted-of-theft-after-smuggling-out-162k-in-gold-nuggets-inside-his-butt/wcm/5a76dae2-ce56-420d-9326-918f58cb9725/ 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 3y ago
  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/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ which seems very good for an apparently entry level job.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    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.

ben30 3y ago

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 £1 coins he carried from laundry payments.

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DarnyEscoba 3y ago

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1letterunixname 3y ago

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 3y ago

> an indoor fountain His fatal mistake. Anyone with an indoor fountain is obviously up to _something_.

CodeSheikh 3y ago

Is this the infamous magnet-bandit? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salim_Kara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salim_Kara

1letterunixname 3y ago
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 3y ago
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.

amelius 3y ago

This was before surveillance cameras were at every corner of every street.

MaryGab 3y ago

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jackmurphy2117 3y ago

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