Skimming from public transit is an old trick.<p>There was case like this in Boston about 15 years ago that came to light as they were switching away from tokens to Charlie Cards. It was an MBTA mechanic. IIRC he was caught because it looked strange that someone kept showing up with bags of tokens to exchange for cash at one of the stations.<p>Even with the new card system, someone figured out a scheme to steal:<p><a href="https://www.universalhub.com/2011/mbta-revere-man-made-sold-millions-dollars-worth-u" rel="nofollow">https://www.universalhub.com/2011/mbta-revere-man-made-sold-...</a><p>And when I was a kid there was a big parking meter scandal in which most of the collectors were implicated after a resident saw two of them skimming. Loved this quote from the investigator:<p><i>''The meters in Boston are the oldest I've ever seen,'' Mr. Vitagliano said. ''In some cases, it is actually easier to take a quarter out of one of our meters than to put a quarter in. I mean that.''</i><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/08/us/boston-meter-collectors-charged-with-coin-theft.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/08/us/boston-meter-collector...</a>
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.
As an American, the part of the story that is very interesting to me is that Canadian coins have enough ferrous content to be picked up by a magnet. Wouldn’t the ability for coins to become magnetized cause all sorts of issues for the internal workings of vending machines and other coin slot using mechanisms?
> 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.<p>If that was their 1981 salary, that’s damn impressive.
> 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.<p>I can't picture how his rig worked, the article would have benefitted by anything visual help :/
Lots of confusion here about what such a meter actually looks like. See the start of this [0] document for a photo. It’s an older photo but I remember the same from Edmonton in the 1980s. No digital display, no thermal printer, etc. They were numerous — one meter for each parking spot. Later in the subject’s tenure they were swapped for digital display/timer meters with the same form factor (still no printer).<p><a href="https://pub-edmonton.escribemeetings.com/filestream.ashx?DocumentId=8062" rel="nofollow">https://pub-edmonton.escribemeetings.com/filestream.ashx?Doc...</a><p>Edit: disregard — this doc is for parking meters rather than LRT machines (which the article also calls LTR).
> As Kara repaid the proceeds of his scam to cover the city’s insurers, he was released after 16 months.<p>It's hard to find any information about this since it happened 30 years ago, but I wonder if he had to pay a fine. If not, he probably made out pretty well, investing the $2 million into real estate.
In the words of Ace Rothstein in the movie Casino.<p><i>” You can spot these assholes by watching the way they bet. Like this guy. He's bettin' lavender chips at five hundred each with only one little problem. He's always guessed right. If he wasn't so fuckin' greedy, he'd have been tougher to spot. But in the end, they're all greedy.”</i>
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!
<i>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</i><p>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?
I'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.
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 the coin was stamped.<p>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?<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_pusher" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_pusher</a><p>[1] No<p>[2] British slang for 1 and 2 penny coins due to colour
P: <i>This sounds familiar.</i><p>M: <i>Yeah... they did it in Superman III.</i><p>P: <i>Right.</i><p>M: <i>What a good movie, actually. And then a bunch of hackers did it in the 70s as well and one of 'em got busted.</i><p>P: <i>Well, so they check for this now.</i><p>M: <i>No, here's the thing. Initech's so backed up with all the software we're updating for the year 2000, they'd never notice.</i><p>P: <i>You're right. And even if they wanted to, they couldn't check all that code.</i><p>M: <i>Thumbs up their asses. Thumbs up their asses.</i><p>P: <i>So, Michael, what's to stop you from doing this?</i><p>M: <i>It's not worth the risk, I got a good job.</i><p>P: <i>What if you *didn't* have a good job?</i><p>Edit: All of the publicly available scripts and quotes were wrong. Checked the original source. ;@]
Sounds like he used a common telescoping magnet tool, typically used by mechanics for picking up dropped screws, nuts, and bolts. An “antenna with a magnet on the end” is an accurate description.
I did a quick google search, and this is what the LRT ticket machines looked like in 1988 (which includes the period in question):<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Frv59vprbgyp51.jpg%3Fwidth%3D624%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Df902751fdaf76698598138f0d2d6d21013590568" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....</a>
Making $17/hr in 1994 is equivalent to $31/hr in 2023.<p>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.
A quick Google didn't return any books on this, unfortunately.<p>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 this the infamous magnet-bandit? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salim_Kara" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salim_Kara</a>
Too bad it doesn’t say how he actually got found out. I imagine he could have gotten away with it if he had gradually reduced his theft of coins over 2-3 years, then quit the job and moved somewhere else. I’m pretty sure there’s tons of schemes like this that aren’t ever found out.
No my dear Kara. Coins have three sides. Can't forget the edge.<p>"Before his sentencing in March 1996, Kara made an enigmatic statement in court, promising at some point to share his side of this fascinating tale “Remember, every coin has two sides”
“ Sooner or later, the temptation to spend became too much and maybe thinking he would never get caught in 1992, Kara decided to trade up from his modest $136,000 home to something much more fitting of a vending-machine millionaire.”<p>Well… what’s the point of stealing money if you can’t ever spend 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.
Reminds me of a lesser-known story from the Falklands War. On the HMS Sheffield, there was a civilian laundry worker. When the ship was struck and sank, he tragically drowned, reportedly burdened by a large number of £1 coins he carried from laundry payments.
Reminded me of this great American Dad episode: <a href="https://americandad.fandom.com/wiki/Meter_Made" rel="nofollow">https://americandad.fandom.com/wiki/Meter_Made</a>