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ATM Repairman Accused of Taking (and Faking) Cash
fysdt writes "An ATM repairman was nabbed in Phoenix on charges of having stolen about $200,000 in ATM funds. His method was almost brilliant in its sheer stupidity: He pocketed the cash, and replaced it in the machines with 'counterfeit or photocopied $20 bills.'"
Go to ATM... Spit out money... "Yep, the dollar ain't what it used to be..."
Geez, he has $200,000 in cash and can't make bail? He should have asked the arresting officer to stop by an ATM on his way to jail ...
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
He pushed a button on a photocopy machine. The machine is a technical wonder - you put one paper in and a copy of it appears after you push a button - like magic.
Aren't color photocopiers supposed to give an error message when you try to copy a banknote?
It gives us geeks somebody to point at and say "duh, stupid!"
We get to feel all superior, in this case, with real justification.
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
An ATM guy called Kioskli. Classic.
To be fair, he was a Diebold employee. He probably assumed that there was no fraud sufficiently blatant to be punished for.
More realistically, he was probably an opportunist, possibly with a newfound need for fast cash, and good counterfeit currency, while certainly not impossible to make or obtain, is not something you can just get ahold of in a moment. Were a sophisticated counterfeiting operation looking for a dispersal method, an ATM service dude might be a useful 'hire'. A random ATM service dude probably doesn't know how to just look up the local counterfeiters...
There is such thing as Gresham's law, and gov't decree only makes the matters worse due to capital flight. You can outlaw real money, but you can't make your fake money have any value artificially.
You can't handle the truth.
Wrong
1. Join Bank Management
2. Pay yourself a bonus every time the Bank gives a loan
3. Loan out all the banks money, and when that runs out, borrow more from other banks and lend that money out in turn.
4. PROFIT! (Beyond your wildest dreams)
5. When the bank goes bust, ride away into the sunset with a handsome golden parachute.
May the Maths Be with you!
My Dad always told me there was a little man in the ATM printing the money it spit out!
"We'll cross the minefield under the cover of daylight..." -A. Rimmer
The people who withdrew money from this ATM will probably never get their money back, since customers are always fully liable for ATM transactions. The banks will just write it off as a loss, which comes right out of their customers checking accounts. Worse, if the people don't notice they'll even be held responsible for trying to pass of counterfeit bills they thought were real.
He'd have access to the money box inside the machine, thus bypassing the sensors. Open it up to count the money, slip a few $20s out and replace them with a few fakes; as long as the money count comes out right when the next serviceman comes to check the ATM, nobody would know the difference... and if they eventually found the fakes it'd just look like some bank customer(s) had passed the fake $20s to the machine.
However, if the machine should have been able to detect the forgeries, that might be one thing that led them to suspect a repairman was behind it - bank customers shouldn't be able to feed the machine fake $20s.
Some years ago, I worked for a company (two companies actually) centered around the ATM vending machine service. While there, I learned how trivial it actually is to rob ATMs. While I am certain the technologies and security protocols involved have evolved beyond my previous knowledge of the time, most ATMs were a small terminal with a cash dispenser and connected to "the network" by a simple dialup modem which operated over the public POTS network. By using a device called a "skuch" box which simulated POTS networking, modems and other such things such as a laptop with transaction processing software simulating the ATM authorization network, a person could connect to a local ATM terminal, run simulated transactions and dispense real cash in massive amounts without raising a great deal of suspicion from most shops and stores which host ATMs.
As I said, my knowledge is "OLD." I am pretty sure the are now using other communications technologies such as wireless networks and such, but given that it has been shown how trivial taking over or creating your own local GSM network actually, is, adapting the previously described methods to current technologies would not only be easier, but could be done wirelessly from a "service van" close by. (I observe that many businesses still authorize credit card transactions over POTS so it seems to me that ATM debit transactions are still done over POTS as well, so many the old methods are still valid in some places.)
But you get the idea -- ATMs are cash dispensers controlled by highly vulnerable computers operating over highly vulnerable networks.
Gold's value is also arbitrary, just a little more stable. It has value only because people have historically desired gold; if all of a sudden people were to decide gold looked ugly, I think you would start to see that it doesnt really have "intrinsic value" other than its use in semiconductors and fillings.
If he wanted to steal from the bank, here's a better, technical solution:
Every time there's a bank transaction where interest is computed, you know, thousands a day? The computer ends up with these fractions of a cent, which it usually rounds off. Just take those little remainders and put them into an account.
There were a couple movies where this was done and it worked brilliantly.
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
I really shouldn't respond, but I can't resist. By 'real money' do you mean gold? Gold is only good for trade since we all agree that it is worth something. This is the same reason that money printed by governments is worth something: we all agree that it is. Gold is in the middle of a huge bubble right now. If it were traded like a normal commodity it would be worth way less. Once people stop being so paranoid it is going to crash hard. Also, since it is constantly being mined, it too is constantly getting devalued.
No, if he was smarter he would have grabbed a couple of million then gone to the Bahamas.
As a police friend of mine says, if you're going to commit a crime, do it just once and make it worthwhile. The people who get caught are the ones who have to keep going back to do it again.
No sig today...
Your describing a situation where trust is lost. If trust is lost, how does the merchant know you really have gold in the vault? For that matter, even if you bring gold to the merchant, how does the merchant quickly test to ensure the gold is 100% pure and has not been cut with some other metal, or that your gold is not just gold plate? The modern world requires trust. A breakdown of which will result in anarchy. Food/water/guns will be much more valuable than gold.
A) It's just bail. Bail has to do with risk of fleeing not punishment for a crime.
B) He probably pissed the money away as fast as he got it
C) 175K is't really enough money to go into hiding for any sizable period of time.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
and what value does shiny yellow metal have besides the ability to get you laid if you use real money to buy it for hot women?
The ATM machines don't hold that much. I know... I did some pick-up work as an ATM messenger (read: guy who stuff's money in and takes deposits out) for a while after the dot.Bomb. Typical bank ATM might hold $200K in $20's if it was full. The little ATMs that you find in a Walmart or 7-11 are maxed out at $60K.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
This guy was in Phoenix. US banknotes. Crappy security features compared to other nations currencies.
Have gnu, will travel.
why, is getting laid by hot women not good enough for you? Anyway, here is something to start with.
Women are not as dumb as some would believe - they don't take fake money, they require the real deal, and screw the 'legal tender', which has to be accepted just because politicians say so.
You can't handle the truth.
Right, the thing is afaict there are three stages to "getting caught"
1: the police decide it was probablly a given person
2: the police manage to track the person down and arrest them
3: the court confirms the polices determination in 1
If the criminal can break the chain at any of these stages then they don't "get caught"
This criminal spectacually failed to break the chain at stage 1 (he used his work ID). He kept it stopped at stage 2 for a while but ultimately failed (the article doesn't say exactly how but I would guess that the only driving license he had available at the traffic stop was one tied to his old identity) and it seems unlikely he will break the chain at stage 3 either.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Those in category 1 would usually be annoyed that they had funny money but would be cooperative. The other 2 categories no so much. Very often these people would become belligerent and when informed that I would be bringing in the police would get threatening. The worst case was one individual who had tried to pass a counterfeit $100 bill that he had run off on his home ink jet printer. The colors were all wrong, incorrect weight, incorrect texture, was cut wrong (used scissors), missing the water mark, missing security strip, and also failed the counterfeit detector pen.He insisted that the bill was real as he had just gotten it from the ATM (our ATM only Dispensed $20s) and that he had a wallet full of them now, yes he really did show me a pile of counterfeit $100s. When informed that I was calling the cops he threatened me stormed off. The nice thing was that the Eagan police station was only a couple of blocks down the road. So while I was calling the police he was stuck at the light waiting to turn right heading towards the police station. I was able to give the police a complete description of the person, car description, and license plate number. The picked him up about half way between the gas station and police station.
Time to offend someone
You are way off base on the number of reasons why gold is money and would have been money if it all had to play out over again
found the full version.
0. It cannot be printed by politicians to buy elections.
1. It's rare, but not too rare.
2. It's easy to test (chemically or with ultrasound for thick bars).
3. It's easily recognizable.
4. It has no major industrial use.
5. It does not change over time, drop it in the ocean, recover it centuries later and it's the same.
6. Easy to work with (easy to split, melt, mint coins, etc.)
7. It's stable, it does not explode, it's not a poison, not radioactive, not a gas, does not corrode, does not decay radioactively.
8. People like it, it looks nice.
Point is those ARE intrinsic values. Saying they are not is like falling into the homunculus theory of mind fallacy, where you expect things to be reduced forever, and this infinite regress would not answer the question of what is really your mind vs what is the observer. We are physical beings, not spirits, we live in physical world, and things we value are physical because they allow us to get things we need for survival.
You can't handle the truth.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When you have a serious oversupply of frail minded individuals then surely you invite predators.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
It's worse than that. This guy was an employee of their ATM division, which makes products that count things people care about. Their election systems division is the shallow end of the talent pool.
Forget the gloat, show some empathy. Quite clearly a 64 year flip out. Felt his life had gone nowhere, died his hair and basically had a mental breakdown and committed a crime that he must have known he would never get away with.
That final acceptance of imminent demise compared to the immortality of youth and no hope of change in future strike many people in different ways, fortunately the harm caused by this bout of temporary insanity was minimal. Keeping screwing tighter the screws of competitive pressure of the difference between winning and losing and you inevitably get more illogical public failures.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen