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

nofreelunch.co.uk

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

#251

Post by Scoundreller »

codelikeawolf wrote: post #204
dghughes wrote: post #148

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.

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.

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…

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

#252

Post by Scoundreller »

abkolan wrote: post #172

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.

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.

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

#253

Post by 1letterunixname »

CodeSheikh wrote: post #249

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

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.

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

#254

Post by Scoundreller »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #36
walthamstow wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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?

Heh, every Toronto subway station is manned, you can imagine what that does to costs. Often multiple entrances = multiple booth staff.

Going to unmanned and paying someone a premium to rapidly respond and fix machines 24/7 would be a massive cost reduction.

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

#255

Post by benlivengood »

rileymat2 wrote: post #138
dkasper wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite because it’s almost backward with banks. Yes they take your deposits, but to the bank a deposit is a liability not an asset. Banks can lend out much more than their deposits (fractional reserve) but they technically don’t even need deposits at all to create a loan, because a loan is credit (asset) and a liability to the borrower. This means banks in the modern sense can literally create money, so they don’t…

The part that is missing is that when you take that money to buy the thing intended with the loan the bank has to give you that money unless it is going to a customer of the same bank; impacting the fractional reserve requirement. As a thought experiment, if you started a bank from 0, how do you pay out the first loan? Yes, they create money, but deposits are a requirement to do it. (Unless you are doing some interes…

I think a primary benefit of a bank is the ability to borrow directly from the Federal Reserve or similar central government bank. The spread on interest rates between the central bank and consumer rates is revenue.

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

#256

Post by codelikeawolf »

mkjonesuk wrote: post #108

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

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.

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

#257

Post by Scoundreller »

tyingq wrote: post #71
ben_w wrote: post #28

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…

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.

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.

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

#258

Post by robterrell »

hinkley wrote: post #201
codeulike wrote: post #119

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.

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 thi…

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

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

#259

Post by Scoundreller »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #133
Scoundreller wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 transac…

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.

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

#260

Post by Scoundreller »

toogan wrote: post #174
thinkingemote wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How do you report it? Is there a field "income from illegal activities" in the tax forms? Asking for a friend.

Sometimes. When there isn’t, there’s a directive to enter it under “other income” or something similar.

https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.1407698

Depending on the seriousness of the crime, the taxman may or may not be able to share those details with law enforcement.

I think the cutoff is if the sentence could be for 14 years, they can share it.

When Canada legalized marijuana, they made many infractions punishable by up to 14 years. So if you sell unlawful marijuana to a minor, you could get 0 to 14 years in prison. As a result, many illegal marijuana sellers will require ID to avoid this (dunno if they’re paying taxes or not, but makes sense to care about this if they are).

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