TIL about Salim Kara, who stole over $2m of coins by using a car antenna and a magnet
Read the crazy story of how over 13 yrs a ticket-machine maintenance man stole $2mill in coins from Edmonton LRT with a magnet & car antenna
Surprising that any nation’s currency would be magnetic. Coins are usually made of brass, zinc, copper, silver, etc.
Steel is cheap. Copper, zinc, nickel, brass and especially silver are rather expensive.
Many world coins up to about 10-50c are steel plated copper or similar.
Most of the world considers it unacceptable to have a coin that costs more to manufacture than it is worth, let alone have just the raw materials cost that much. Smaller coins have often been simply removed.
In the US, on the other hand, apparently the zinc industry is able to force the continued expensive existence of the penny.
UK lower value coins (1p, 2p, 5p, 10p) are steel (depending on when they were made) coated in something else.
The higher value coins are not. I assume it's a cost thing.
Coins haven't been made of those for a long time. It's steel.
I don't think the US uses steel
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, amounting to around 2 million customer journeys. It seems inconceivable that he wasn’t caught sooner.
This really does seem inconceivable. I'm an industry accountant and worked in the safe room counting drawers for a supermarket and a cafeteria. I lose it when I'm not balanced, even $10 on a 200k deposit. How... How was someone not noticing 20%?? Hell he deserves it with the lack of controls in place. Maybe things were different then...
It's the government, it's not their money. Finding the discrepancy is extra work which is kryptonite to government employees.
This is the City of Edmonton. Having worked there the least surprising part of this story is that even when they noticed, instead of investigating further, they wrote it off as an error.
It's written that they did notice it but were unable to pinpoint the problem and thought it is a software bug. Reminds of a recent story where an actual software bug got post workers in the UK jail time and huge fines because they were accused of stealing that money
The Horizon thing? Yeah, that's a massive scandal, absolutely appalling.
For anyone interested, here's just one of the many, many stories about this: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/feb/18/ex-post-office-staff-tell-inquiry-of-stress-of-it-scandal
I work in a firm that does accounting and so far we've been accurate to the cent, every single time.
I think it's sort of implied by the article that there was not sophistication in the 80s to audit the money. And then the couple times the money was audited, it was chalked up to a software glitch. If this happened today, yes, it would be counted and corroborated basically daily, but in the 80s?
Imagine if he had just bought a few lame apartments and then washed his money as rent. He might never have been caught.
According to the article, he did. What got attention was when he bought a million dollar house for himself.
His biggest problem was not stopping. He had already banked $2million but kept going. That's like making away with a $2m bank heist and showing back up at the same bank the next day to do it again.
If he had stopped but kept working for several years, he would have never been caught because audits would have lined up while he was still there.
Kara was effectively stealing 20% of LRT fares over the 13-year period; one in five coins that were fed into the machines by the paying public ended up in his shaving bag, amounting to around 2 million customer journeys. It seems inconceivable that he wasn’t caught sooner.
That 20% seems off. Wouldn't that mean the expected income from that thirteen years would only be 10-15 million?
Maybe 20% of fares from machines? Or machines in one station? Or maybe most people didn't use machines?
Most regular transit users have passes
17.66$ per hour in 1983 is equal to 50$ per hour today which is just a fine salary?
Good question.
a capitalist hero
let's get this guy working on the climate problem down at NASA.. give him a set of titanium tools and a couple of supercomputers and just see what he comes up with.. outside the box thinking, that's what we need in here..
Ehhh. Let him keep it. Honestly, he had the patience to do it and nobody clued in for so long that in this case, he won.
That was a great read! Gotta admit, I’m impressed he was able to continue the scam so long.
Having worked for the city of Edmonton I can tell you the fact that no one realized what was happening and wrote it off as an accounting error is just so....expected. That someone might be stealing from the city is even more expected.
You see, I was picturing something far more mundane with the headline of "stole" coins. I figured it'd be a story about somebody picking up loose change and some jackass claiming that was stealing. After reading through it I still feel for the guy but yeah, that's definitely a crime.
Me taking a coin out of my pocket and looking at both sides
He’s right!
I say good on him.
