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Thieves Use Vacuum To Siphon Cash From Safes
Tootech writes "A gang of thieves armed with a powerful vacuum cleaner that sucks cash from supermarket safes has struck for the fifteenth time in France. The burglars broke into their latest store near Paris and drilled a hole in the pneumatic tube that siphons money from the checkout to the strong-room. They then sucked rolls of cash totaling £60,000 from the safe without even having to break its lock. Police said the gang — dubbed the Vacuum Burglars — always raid Monoprix supermarkets and have hit 15 of the stores branches around Paris in the past four years. A spokesman added: 'They spotted a weakness in the company's security system and have been exploiting it ever since.'"
Sounds like someone has been watching "How To Beat The High Co$t Of Living". Anyone remember that movie? Similar plot, only it was a big bubble holding $1 million in cash in the middle of a shopping mall.
Wouldn't a vacuum cleaner that size be really loud?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Did anyone else picture the Beagle Boys doing this when you read the article?
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
That sucks.
What sucks enough must blow.
after all like software that does p2p its the cause of them being able to steal cash....we need to regulate and make sure you have controls for the vacuums
Well, nothing sucks like a VAX...
Are they living in a vacuum? How many times do you have to get suckered before you change your system? Their business must really be going down the tubes. It blows me away.
(I'm just cleaning up today... :)
That's 15 times already that they've connected to the intertubes to illegally download stuff. HADOPI should have sent out 5 cut-off orders already. Oh wait, they are actually stealing real stuff? Carry on then.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Perhaps it isn't hurting the supermarket enough.
:).
The thieves have taken 4 years to suck up 500000 euros. That's 125000 per year.
Monoprix have more than 300 stores. If it costs more than 500 euros per store per year to install, maintain and support the extra security measures, it'll cost them more than the thieves are taking.
Monoprix might just be hoping that the police would eventually catch the thieves, and nobody else will copy them.
Will be a different thing if they shot or hurt people (since customers might stop going to their stores).
Lastly if the team has 3 members, assuming equal shares, each is only getting an average of about 40K per year. Not peanuts but definitely not a good way to get rich
In contrast, those infamous investment bankers and friends have certainly taken more than 40k/year each...
Fool me... 15 times... :(
Thieves have attempted this approach for as long as this type of cash delivery system has existed, and consequently there are numerous security measures to prevent it. The ceiling space that contains the tubes is usually protected by motion sensors, the cash delivery system usually has some form of intrusion countermeasure that would detect a change in pressure, and the most simple method is a timer system that detects whether the money is received in the strong room N seconds after it's sent by the cashier, triggering an alarm if not.
It seems that for whatever reason this chain of stores hadn't implemented the basic security measures, or they were ineffective, probably due to human error (i.e. forgetting to set the alarm in the roofspace).
You are smart enough to use 'faux' to describe this news, but not to google on the French words: 'voleurs paris aspirateur'... For example the first link I found.
;-)
Other than that: Nice try, It's good to check for faux news, but be sure not to make a faux pas youself.
I have worked for a large retail chain, and I can whole-heartedly confirm this logic. They have a chain of over 1000 stores, and some of the costing that was done blew your mind.
Want to put a lock on the IT cabinet in each store? $100 per cabinet (buy the lock, pay the service guy to go in, train the store people to use the key/make duplicates). *1000 stores, and you're suddenly looking at a non-trivial amount of money for something that should be a simple, no brainer.
We saw similar things when we wanted to put a shelf in each cabinet to help organize the various little device that went in the cabinet. $200 per store ... forget it. Print labels to put on each piece of equipment to help the store identify it? $50 per store. Forget it.
It was a good experience ... we learned how to think in massive scale for every project, every little idea we had, but we also found it incredibly stifling. And thats why I *used* to work there.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
I'd always imagined the trick there is to present your case in a, "It's $350 per store, one time, but it'll cost you $1000/yr, per store, in lost/broken equipment and wasted man hours if we don't".
I don't doubt your experience at all. I can see things going down that way, corporate culture and all being what it is.
But I still don't get it.
If a guy with a small store would have to expense similar tasks, (locks on cabinets, a labeling system, etc).. at his level of the economy. Why is the same a problem for a huge 1000+ store chain? I mean, they are that big because they are making money - right? And you'd think that the economy of scale would mae the installation of some of these things even cheaper proportionally than it would be for the small shop guy.
Huh?
The scaling is not linear. As a company gets bigger they do make more money but not as much more as it costs to run things.
That's a problem in general with all sorts of designs that need to scale. Once you get past a certain point you run into all sorts of organizational and operational issues that are difficult to solve.
In other words, it's much harder to maintain a huge successful business than a small successful one. Think of it as a King of the Hill game.
How do you cost out not having a lock on a cabinet or not having a extra shelf?
Because at that scale, it's enough money to notice.
When I worked at a small 10-employee company, the owner would always get really good coffee for the break room. Cost a few $ more, but wasn't a big deal.
When I moved to a 20,000-employee company, the good coffee didn't last long, because $(peanuts * 20,000) is enough savings to be noticed (and increase the bonus of some executive, so he's not going to leave it on the table for the next guy).
Risk assessment. The guy with one store only has one store. If someone steals his server, he is tits up till he replaces it. If someone steals one of the servers out of one of the 1000 stores, there are still 999 making money for the company.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA