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> 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.
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?
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.
It's amazing how far you can get in crime by not driving a flash car and just generally keeping a low profile
Your neighbours will be too afraid you’ll wonder the same question about them.
> 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.
Indeed, that's about $117k (CAD) per year in 2023. (80k euro, 88k usd)
That is absolutely disgraceful on the part of the accountants and programmers who should have been reconciling the cash vs sales. Over 13 years!
Read up on the UK Post Office Horizon scandal if you want a really horrible example of this.
Instead of buggy code causing innocent people to become criminals, here a “computer glitch” was blamed to explain away a signs of criminal behavior.
> Remember, every coin has two sides Unless his coins were microscopically thin, three sides would be more accurate
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.
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.
Earlier 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?
From Wikipedia: The LRT system had an estimated 18,220 weekday passenger boardings in 1978.
If I remember correctly fares ranged somewhere between 35-65 cents in those days.
That is absolutely disgraceful on the part of the accountants and programmers who should have been reconciling the cash vs sales. Over 13 years!
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.
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.
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.