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

https://www.nofreelunch.co.uk/blog/salim-kara-lrt-scam/

by nethunters • 3 years ago

426 290 3 years ago

nofreelunch.co.uk

badcppdev2• 3 years 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!

mschuster91• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

You're right in principle, but are they usually 20%?

kvdveer• 3 years ago

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.

Doctor_Fegg• 3 years ago

Read up on the UK Post Office Horizon scandal if you want a really horrible example of this.

function_seven2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

badcppdev2• 3 years ago

Good point. 1981 was a very long time ago in IT terms

cogogo• 3 years ago

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.

Cthulhu_6• 3 years ago

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.

refurb4• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

Just say it's a glitch but never write a fix ticket and it will hang.

whycome6• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

psychlops• 3 years ago

Complicit would be another word to consider.

hinkley4• 3 years 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.

hinkley4• 3 years ago

Spread out that's still $150k a year. Someone should have noticed >12k a month disappearing.

codeulike2• 3 years 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?

londons_explore• 3 years ago

If you're employed as a machine repairman, I assume you visit every machine pretty frequently...

codetrotter• 3 years ago

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.

yreg• 3 years ago

Do you though? How often did these things need maintenance?

toogan10• 3 years 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.

walthamstow2• 3 years 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?

tgsovlerkhgsel• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

Probably 20% of _coin fares_. Most people pay with pre-purchased tickets or have a transit pass.

abdullahkhalids• 3 years ago

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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

thinkingemote2• 3 years 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.

toogan10• 3 years 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.

mrtksn8• 3 years 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.

nicgrev1034• 3 years ago

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.

belter3• 3 years ago

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.

samirillian• 3 years ago

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.

sbarre2• 3 years ago

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?

belter3• 3 years ago

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-...

Waterluvian2• 3 years ago

He likely paid interest on the money too. That interest is part of what he stole.

sherlock_h• 3 years 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.

toogan10• 3 years 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.

whycome6• 3 years ago

That's fairly vague though. What red flags? How were they novel?

forinti2• 3 years 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.

toogan10• 3 years 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.

thinkingemote2• 3 years 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?

renewiltord• 3 years ago

https://www.irs.gov/publications/p525#en_US_2022_publink1000...

For the US, yes.

forinti2• 3 years ago

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.

dennis_jeeves22• 3 years 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 ;)

rocqua• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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

refurb4• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

boomboomsubban3• 3 years 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.

toogan10• 3 years ago

There is a sizeable community doing so called "magnet fishing". Check out r/magnetfishing

boomboomsubban3• 3 years ago

Coins don't seem to be their target, as very few seem to be magnetic.

evan_2• 3 years 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!

toogan10• 3 years ago

Hm, what about vending machines with things you make yourself, legitimately without any paper trail that would show what you are making?

evan_2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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_6• 3 years 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"

planede• 3 years ago

Correlating with water and electricity bills could raise suspicion, but yeah, it's probably harder.

HarHarVeryFunny3• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

If anyone asks, tell them the receipt comes out if they shake it!

walthamstow2• 3 years ago

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

Scoundreller28• 3 years 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_6• 3 years 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.

HarHarVeryFunny3• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

(2022)

ben_w3• 3 years 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

[1] No

[2] British slang for 1 and 2 penny coins due to colour

toogan10• 3 years 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_w3• 3 years 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_• 3 years 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 :)

ajb2• 3 years ago

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_w3• 3 years ago

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.

tyingq• 3 years ago

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.

Scoundreller28• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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

refurb4• 3 years 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• 3 years 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_6• 3 years 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).

Scoundreller28• 3 years 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.

paulluuk3• 3 years ago

Indeed, that's about $117k (CAD) per year in 2023. (80k euro, 88k usd)

Scoundreller28• 3 years 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.

dmix2• 3 years 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&...

dennis_jeeves22• 3 years ago

Put another way, the current generation of earners have a raw deal. High inflation, high cost of housing etc. etc. Oh, Canada!

mkl95• 3 years ago

Remember, every coin has two sides

Unless his coins were microscopically thin, three sides would be more accurate

blackoil• 3 years ago

Three surfaces. Infinite side or two depending on your position on how many edges a circle has.

paulluuk3• 3 years 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_seven2• 3 years 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!

4hg4ufxhy• 3 years ago

Can there be more sides than atoms on the surface?

drgo2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

drgo2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

If we take cannabis legislation as a guideline for other laws, farming as an occupation faces a grim future.

typon• 3 years ago

He gave a bunch of the money back

JeffSnazz• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

tiborsaas• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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_6• 3 years 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• 3 years 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/...

Scoundreller28• 3 years ago

$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.

fennecfoxy2• 3 years ago

Didn't need Ali back then - you could get a lotta stuff in the hardware/hobby stores that still existed when I was a kid (long after the 80s).

Dick Smith was the kiwi one, then they kind of stopped doing hardware/electronic parts at all, then went online only. Not sure if they're even still around, now.

Hobby stores are closing all over the place, but only bc they've been replaced by online/Adafruit, Sparkfun, etc.

hinkley4• 3 years ago

I can't picture how you stand there long enough to steal thousands of dollars per week without anybody noticing for 13 years.

kodt• 3 years ago

He did it in the middle of the night

btbuildem• 3 years ago

Somewhere in my toolbox I have one of those "antennas" -- it's basically just that, a telescoping steel rod, likely the exact same thing as an old portable radio antenna, tipped with a magnet. Mine isn't a fancy neodymium magnet either, it's one of the old graphite-coloured ones. Its intended use is for fishing out dropped nuts and bolts when working in tight quarters.

thedougd• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

codelikeawolf2• 3 years 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.

Waterluvian2• 3 years 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?

toyg2• 3 years 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_6• 3 years 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.

HarHarVeryFunny3• 3 years 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.

rsynnott3• 3 years 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.

codeulike2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Missed the joke.

theptip• 3 years ago

The direction of travel relative to jail is the opposite though.

hinkley4• 3 years 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.

Scoundreller28• 3 years 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.

robterrell• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_%26_Marge_Go_Large

dmix2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

Luckily for him, Canada has a $2 coin. If he tried this in the US, he’d only make $250k

ikekkdcjkfke• 3 years ago

When money becomes a target, it fails to be a good money?

macshome• 3 years 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?

whycome6• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

US quarters cannot be picked up by magnets.

andy992• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

NelsonMinar3• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

TheRealPomax• 3 years ago

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.

hakfoo• 3 years ago

The US and Canada discontinued silver coins at about the same time (mid-1960s). The US went for a copper-nickel alloy sandwich and Canada went for pure nickel (which I believe is now nickel-plated steel).

dghughes• 3 years 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.

codelikeawolf2• 3 years 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.

Scoundreller28• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

abkolan• 3 years 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.

Scoundreller28• 3 years 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.

StayTrue2• 3 years 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?Doc...

Edit: disregard — this doc is for parking meters rather than LRT machines (which the article also calls LTR).

hn8305823• 3 years 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.

Scoundreller28• 3 years 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.

StayTrue2• 3 years ago

You’re right!

Scoundreller28• 3 years 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....

sirmike_• 3 years 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”

Scoundreller28• 3 years 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....

ilamont• 3 years 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-...

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...

Scoundreller28• 3 years 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-emp...

In 2015, this fellow was making $55k/yr, contrast to the guy in the article making $31k in 1981.

andy992• 3 years 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/ which seems very good for an apparently entry level job.

JackFr• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

I recall seeing that happen on one occasion and thinking, you've earned it.

avidiax2• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/CtpVe

foooorsyth2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

more_corn• 3 years ago

I was visiting my cousin in Seattle, I must have been 15. Everyone else went in while he “fixed the meter” I hung back and watched. He sat on the curb filing a penny on the concrete. Apparently if you file it so it fits in the dime slot the rough edge would catch and you could just keep spinning the dial to add the max time to the meter. Of course don’t choose one of the old copper ones or you’ll be there all night.

The repair shops must have hated that. Imagine having to take apart meter after meter to remove the stuck penny.

NelsonMinar3• 3 years ago

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...

wkat4242• 3 years ago

Amsterdam too.. It was a huge problem.

ben30• 3 years 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.

1letterunixname3• 3 years 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. ;@]

rsynnott3• 3 years ago

an indoor fountain

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

CodeSheikh• 3 years ago

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

1letterunixname3• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

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

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