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
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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.
Its extra work for any employee, the government just doesnt pretend like it's going to reward you like corporate america pretends it will do.
In both cases you just get more work to do, but the latter has better marketing.
Corporate America rewarding you.....lmao. Yeah. I wish.
This guy bureaucracies
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
There is a pretty good tv series that just came out today about it as well. Mr Bates vs. the Post Office. I just started watching it today. Crazy story. Those poor people. They got fucked royally.
Yeah, heard about that, not seen it yet, but might check it out.
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?
