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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)

#91

Post by belter »

mywacaday wrote: post #87
belter wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I worked in a bank in Europe that was Dutch owned and we were requied to take two weeks. I don't know of that was a company policy though.

Sounds like these are recommendations some organizations can use or substitute by better methods of auditing. I would argue that if fraud can be covered by the presence of an individual, the problem is with the audit processes and controls in place.

Plus the individual being aware of the requirement could easily circumvent by only stealing every quarter or every month :-)

"Required Absences from Sensitive Positions" - https://www.newyorkfed.org/banking/circulars/10923.html

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

#92

Post by aaronmdjones »

tiborsaas wrote: post #86

> 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 :/

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.

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

#93

Post by Cthulhu_ »

tiborsaas wrote: post #86

> 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 :/

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.

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

#94

Post by lotsofpulp »

mrtksn wrote: post #90
lotsofpulp wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That's not what banks do. You can do that without being a bank, like PayPal. Except PayPal has no FDIC protection. The part of the bank (or credit union) that required the US government to provide FDIC protection was due to dealing with cash. Imagine creating a country with just electronic money. What purpose would a bank with a FDIC protection serve if the government can just operate electronic money accounts itsel…

>Imagine creating a country with just electronic money. What purpose would a physical bank serve? Investing customers money, create money. Most money in the world is digital already, there are many banks that don't have physical presence and traditional banks are shutting down branches more than the open because branches are just the foot soldiers. There are also countries where cash is almost not used. Banks are not…

>Investing customers money, create money.

And they can do this without a federal government backstop, just like an SP500 ETF does or a US Treasuries mutual fund, or an REIT, etc.

My point is the federal government need not provide a subsidy to these businesses that "invest" customer's money (or simply handle the underwriting of loans in many cases).

Right now in the US, via the Fed Funds rate, the federal government pays a business 5.5% just so the business then turns around and pays me 5.05%, all for keeping an entry in a database. And these businesses pay a lot of less discerning depositors a lot less. Surely the federal government can just give all 5.5% to people directly.

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

#95

Post by Cthulhu_ »

nikanj wrote: post #25
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!

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.

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.

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

#96

Post by Cthulhu_ »

londons_explore wrote: post #8
unsupp0rted wrote: post #3

[flagged]

The 20% could easily be missed if it ended up looking like a ticket wasn't sold at all (ie. just 20% fewer tickets got sold). Many railways don't keep track of the paper that tickets are sold on, because the same paper is used for printing receipts, seat reservations, free/discounted tickets etc. Many railways also have a double digit percentage of fare evasion. Also, many railways operate partially/mostly on governm…

But they had a record that said how much he stole. So they knew how much they were supposed to earn vs what they did earn.

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

#97

Post by belter »

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.

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-...

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

#98

Post by Detrytus »

toogan wrote: post #30
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?

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.

I guess most people who ride rail frequently have monthly passes, only those who use it occasionally have to buy tickets at the ticket machine. Also, isn't 25 cents a reasonable price for a single ticket, given that this was 1981?

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

#99

Post by ilammy »

nicgrev103 wrote: post #82
npteljes wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Yes, this is correct. The bank does it in a somewhat government controlled fashion, with checks and balances, which the world has been fighting for a millennia, if not more. And the guy inside does it with stolen money, for personal gain. Consent, for one, is a difference between the two actions, if we…

I'm not sure how many people know this is what the bank is doing with their deposits, making consent difficult.

Usually people don't care what the bank does because they consent to the government making them whole in case the bank fails to return the deposit.

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

#100

Post by mrtksn »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #94
mrtksn wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Imagine creating a country with just electronic money. What purpose would a physical bank serve? Investing customers money, create money. Most money in the world is digital already, there are many banks that don't have physical presence and traditional banks are shutting down branches more than the open because branches are just the foot soldiers. There are also countries where cash is almost not used. Banks are not…

>Investing customers money, create money. And they can do this without a federal government backstop, just like an SP500 ETF does or a US Treasuries mutual fund, or an REIT, etc. My point is the federal government need not provide a subsidy to these businesses that "invest" customer's money (or simply handle the underwriting of loans in many cases). Right now in the US, via the Fed Funds rate, the federal government…

I wouldn't know about the legal structure you would like to invest your assets. Do it as you please, these things vary country by country too. The core concept is that you need to have some kind of structure for handling the money and a method to keep that structure in check.

The problematic part starts when someone acts outside of this structure, like employees who take customers money and invest with it without explicitly having a right to do that.

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