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!
Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
21–30 of 331 posts
Re: Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
#22I'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.
There is a sizeable community doing so called "magnet fishing". Check out r/magnetfishing
Re: Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
#23It's amazing how far you can get in crime by not driving a flash car and just generally keeping a low profile
Re: Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
#24[flagged]
Re: Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
#25That is absolutely disgraceful on the part of the accountants and programmers who should have been reconciling the cash vs sales. Over 13 years!
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.
Re: Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
#26(2022)
Re: Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
#27Kara 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?
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.
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?
Re: Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
#28Interesting. 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
Re: Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
#29A 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.
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.
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.
Re: Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
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.