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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)

#61

Post by [deleted] »

mrtksn wrote: post #60
Freak_NL wrote: post #9

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.

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 th…

[deleted]

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

#62

Post by mft_ »

toogan wrote: post #32
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…

> 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.

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 :)

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

#64

Post by kvdveer »

mschuster91 wrote: post #6
badcppdev wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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

#65

Post by LightBug1 »

hyperpape wrote: post #59
mschuster91 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

No chance! (should be the correct answer).

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

#66

Post by nicgrev103 »

mrtksn wrote: post #60
Freak_NL wrote: post #9

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.

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 th…

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.

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

#67

Post by jaggs »

xnorswap wrote: post #12
unsupp0rted wrote: post #3

[flagged]

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 , the TLDR is the biggest miscarriage of justice in UK history because people insisted the software was right.

About to be the subject of a UK TV series this month.

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

#68

Post by xpe »

refurb wrote: post #43
quickthrower2 wrote: post #16

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

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.

> 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.

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

#69

Post by mrtksn »

nicgrev103 wrote: post #66
mrtksn wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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,…

Yes but banks do it within a legal framework that moderates the risk(at least in theory) and people know what they are signing into and what are their guarantees. You don't see too many banks collapsing, don't you? When it happens, its a big deal like with the SVB earlier last year.

It's also what Sam Bankman-Fried and others did in exchanges that acted as unregulated banks.

The system is not perfect and there are many scandals but if you compare it to what happens in crypto exchanges, its a day and night difference.

Running a machine as intended and screwing up is different from pretending doing one thing and actually doing something else and screwing up. This is also why bankers and fund managers don't usually go to jail when they lose clients money. It's not illegal to suck at your job as long as you follow the rules.

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

#70

Post by renewiltord »

toogan wrote: post #37
forinti wrote: post #13

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.

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.

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

For the US, yes.

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