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Feds: Brink's Employee Makes Off With $196,000 In Quarters (cnn.com)
dfsmith writes: CNN is reporting today on the prosecution of a man who stole $196,000 worth of quarters from his employer in Alabama. Apparently the Brinks facility kept large bags of the coins for the Federal Reserve (about 1 ton each), which the accused emptied and refilled with beads (leaving some coins visible in the bag's window). Dennis faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. That's a million-quarter fine, or 216,000 more quarters than Dennis stole.
Notwithstanding the enterprise of purchasing and transporting that many beads, you've got to wonder: how would you go about this heist, and what would you do with the proceeds?
Notwithstanding the enterprise of purchasing and transporting that many beads, you've got to wonder: how would you go about this heist, and what would you do with the proceeds?
I could park... FOREVER
As recent college students know, laundromats almost always accept quarters as a mechanism for buying machine time, so laundering the proceeds must have been particularly easy and convenient. This guy is obviously a cerebral master of crime.
The bags were stored on skids in the doubtless aptly named Coin Room. An April 2014 audit of the coin inventory showed that four of the bags had been filled mostly with beads. Those bags each contained only $1,000 in quarters, which had been strategically situated so the coins were visible through a plastic window in the necks of the bags, according to federal authorities.
Diabolically clever scheme unravels under the slightest scrutiny.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Well, what I would have done would have been to go to Las Vegas and spend it in the slot machines, but the first time I went to Vegas as an adult I found to my disappointment that the slot machines no longer had slots anymore, and they made the same coin-falling-into-cup sound whether or not the player won.
Not that anyone cares, but that basically was the straw that broke the camel's back for going to Las Vegas without any real reason.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Phones in prisons don't use quarters, they are either collect or via credits purchased via the commissary.
sudo mod me up
Strictly speaking, he'd have no trouble laundering the money. They don't have serial numbers and its not like they'd have a dye pack in there.
The problem is that he'd be limited to buying fast food with his earnings for the next 50 years because I don't know how much effort you'd need to actually turn that much money into a more portable form. I don't think there are enough Coin Star machines between there and the West Coast to do it.
You can tell that this guy had like 1/10th of a really good idea knocking around in his otherwise empty skull and failed to realize that it wasn't nearly enough to make this even remotely feasible. Of course, that's why there are few true criminal masterminds out there. It's easier for someone that smart to actually make money with a real job.
If you took out two pocketfulls of quarters each shift, then converted them to cash in a Coinstar machine on the way home, this makes the whole problem much more manageable. That's easily an extra $50-75.00 each shift.
In a completely unrelated story, CoinStar announces an extra $20,000 in profit from machines around the Alabama area...
Bring them -- in roughly $100 batches -- to various CoinStar machines in your and the surrounding counties. Sure, you'll lose 11%, but that's 11% of free money.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Brilliant. Use the machines to exchange the quarters for fewer quarters. Sounds like you are a true criminal mastermind.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Robber: "I'd like to convert these into pounds."
Teller: "Sure thing! What have you got?"
Robber: "196k in quarters"
Teller: "OK, well, one quarter is 5.67 grams, so....9800 pounds"
Survivalists hoard quarters to get the silver.
Since Slashdot doesn't give me mod points anymore, you'll have to accept my Virtual +5, Funny.
Should this ruffian be apprehended, I believe the correct punishment, as warning and deterrent to others, is that he be drawn... and quartered.
Quarters are supposedly over 91% copper. The 75/25 alloy is just for the "silver" cladding. 5 tons of copper at today's price is worth about $22k.
Given that it costs about 1.7 cents to make a penny, you can claim back the losses on your taxes. Bingo!
Casinos are used to launder money all the time, you put dirty money on the table and get back 70-80% of the face value back in clean money.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
That's a million-quarter fine, or 216,000 more quarters than Dennis stole.
Nerdgasm: 216,000 is 60 cubed !!!
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it. -- Emerson
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Have gnu, will travel.
"The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One." by William K. Black
"You come to us today telling us "We're sorry. We won't do it again. Trust us". Well i have some people in my constituency that actually robbed some of your banks, and they say the same thing." -- Representative Mike Capuano quoted in The Inside Job.
Nah, it's cheaper to just smelt them down into zinc ingots. It's legal (only illegal to melt down pennies and nickels, if I recall) and having a lot of zinc ingots has an easier explanation. (Ex: So, I was going to buy gold bars for when the Apocalypse happens, but I figure that nobody needs gold, per se, but quite a few people need zinc. At least, that's what the guy I bought them off of said. I met him in a bar.)
Casinos are used to launder money all the time, you put dirty money on the table and get back 70-80% of the face value back in clean money.
Casinos still have to report payouts of more than $10,000, per federal Anti-Money-Laundering laws or regulations.
Presumably casinos (never been to one) will give people bills in return for stacks of quarters, for when people win a reasonable amount of money?
You could go to a casino with a backpack full of quarters, spend a couple of hours then, there cash out with the money in your pack. Would obviously take a very long time to convert all the quarters into bills that way, though, and the casino's would get pretty suspicious pretty quickly.
Or, you could just feed your gambling habit with stolen quarters.
Something that can be readily checked.
Per the mint, a quarter is 5.670 grams, 8.33% Nickel, balance copper. So 5.2 grams of copper per coin. $3.65 per pound is about the best you can hope for.
At 454 grams per pound, you're looking at about 4 cents per quarter.
You're probably better off just laundering the money through various means. Hit up the coin exchange whenever you go to walmart, for about $100 or so. Etc...
I don't read AC A human right
He was probably just looking forward to *finally* having a chance at beating Sinistar and Gauntlet
Hit up 10 different casinos for roughly $9k each and you'll be done in 2 years.
I don't read AC A human right
nice greengrocers apostrophe
http://www.oxforddictionaries....
sorry to go all grammar fascist but the name of the company is Brinks right?
http://www.brinks.com/
That's why you use smurfs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Casinos all seem to use electronic tokens now with barcoded chits that print out when you cash out.
There's a History or Discovery channel documentary about a guy who made slugs for casinos during the brief era between coins and electronic tokens. The guy was a retired toolmaker with a little extra money and he bought some equipment capable of making a detailed copy of casino tokens, created a die for stamping them and churned out several.
The first batch didn't work because the machines rejected its magnetic signature. He demilled the design off an actual token and had a metallurgical analysis done and found a commercial alloy used for flatware that was a close match. Those tokens worked.
He would go into a casino, buy a small amount of tokens and then play with a mix of his counterfeits and real tokens. I don't recall if he mostly made money from winnings payouts or by cashing in his fake tokens. He ultimately got caught, I think by visiting the same casino too often, but his copies were nearly indistinguishable from the originals -- I think they actually had to do a metallurgical analysis to determine which were fakes.
Not just gum though, mostly candy.
Copper was selling for $3.65/lb at its peak, years ago. It's now down to $2.20/lb. Further, that price is for "Grade A" pure copper. The 95% copper found in pre-1982 cents would get you less, even if it were legal to melt them down.
Coinflation reports current "melt prices" (the amount you could be paid for metal content, assuming you could separate the component metals for free) of current and obsolete US coins. For US clad coins to be "worth" more than face value, the dollar price of their nickel and copper would have to rise to almost nine times its current value.
Silver coins are another story. They actually trade at more than the value of the silver they contain -- their "melt price" is just over 11 times face value, but you can sell them in quantity for more than 12x, and you'll generally need to pay more than that to buy them.
When an average guy steals money, he gets fined more than what he stole AND jail time... but when a corporation steals money, they get fined a fraction of what they stole and a slap on the wrist? America - what an amazing country.
Republican =/= Racist
Democrats are just as racist as Republicans. They treat black people like they are children and prevent them from moving up by making the jump from welfare to work be extremely expensive.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Lots and lots and laundry... and no more need to put all my clothes into one big machine and have them end up all wrinkly. I could finally actually afford to separate my whites from my darks from my towels and sheets. Oh wait, I don't actually wash my sheets. But I digress...
His punishment should include counting and rolling all those quarters - that's 19,600 rolls of quarters.
Ken
One of the costs of criminal enterprises is that of laundering the money. If you can get 80 cents clean money for each dollar of dirty money, you are doing pretty well.
Which is exactly what you want. You walk up to a table or machine anonymously and play. If you lose, you don't tell anybody. If you win, you cash out the profit as clean money that you won gambling. Normally a gambler would want to offset winnings with losses for tax purposes. But if you're goal is laundering, you want to show a win and pay the taxes on it. As I mentioned in a previous post, you get 80c clean per 100c dirty and then pay the tax. But that's the cost of laundering. You *want* the reports of the winnings it's how you make the money clean.
By the way, 5.67 grams * 196000 quarters = 1111320 grams ~ 2450 pounds.
I think the challenge of this heist, aside from the massive weights involved, would be the replacing of the quarters with beads - so you're not just taking quarters out of bags (putting them into other containers), but you're also bringing IN equivalent size/weight material to replace what you've stolen. That's a brute force hack!
Who put this thing together? Me, that's who.
$196,000 x 4, because there are 4 quarters in a dollar
Are you really so dense that you can think that having played slot machines and ending up with the same quarters, just fewer of them, somehow amounts to having "laundered" them?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The process of laundering money via casino gambling is well understood. So much so that law enforcement actively looks for it. The basic technique is that you can lose as much as you want anonymously but you can't win large sums anonymously. You find the machines with the right size jackpot above 10k. You put in a few hundred bucks. If you lose, move onto the next machine. If you win, you fill out the paperwork to record the winnings. In the end you have a paper trail of large winnings. Nobody knows how many times you lost a few hundred bucks to win that jackpot so the money is now 'clean.' Of course you can only do this a few times before somebody becomes suspicious. The CTRs will tip off investigators. And so will your tax returns. If trying to launder a lot of money you need multiple people. There are more advanced techniques.
well I took my time, did some quick research for southern Florida ...
we change to $$$ machines in the major supermarkets
using $75 + 1 to 24 random we come out with 2300 ( 3% variance) stops average
buy some food for the house ( 10.00 ) per stop
now the change machine will credit you the service fee
and we have about 3 stops per day on a 5 day work week
3 to 4 years of work ( 210 work year )
clearing 200 a day
and eating healthier.
I don't think I can find more than 15 supermarkets to hit in 1 week to do everything
if you see me, smile and say hello.
It's because I read that as "196k quarters", not "196k$ in quarters".
My mistake.
$100,000 in Pennies
- Written by Shel Silverstein, sung by Bobby Bare
Silver coins are another story. They actually trade at more than the value of the silver they contain -- their "melt price" is just over 11 times face value, but you can sell them in quantity for more than 12x, and you'll generally need to pay more than that to buy them.
Didn't you just say that trading for 11x their melt value is pretty normal? It's just that silver coins are even more extreme - 11x melt, vs 9x. The only outlier would be old copper pennies, which have a face under that of their melt.
Having being able to sell in quantity at 12X, but needing to pay even more than that to buy them is pretty standard. The way I tend to put it - the more "buy gold coins!" advertisements you hear, the less of a good idea it generally is.
Realistically speaking, from what I've heard most gold coin - ones that aren't actually currency, is that you'll pay that 12X price per coin, but generally when you go to sell them you'll not only only get melt value, but have to pay assessment costs to ensure that they aren't fake and such as well. So you're taken both ways, and that assumes nobody steals the coins from you.
Buying gold futures or such - where the gold never enters your hands, is a different story, but still not going to save you if the market completely collapses.
In a total market collapse, I tend to say that copper plated lead is probably a better investment. ;)
I don't read AC A human right
I... I'm not sure what you're trying to say. What's "more extreme" than what? Why are "old copper pennies" an "outlier" for having a face value less than their melt value, when the same is true of all silver coins and all gold coins?
The spot value of the silver in $1.00 worth of silver quarters (or dimes or half dollars) is around $11. If you melted them down, refined them into .999 silver, and cast that silver as part of a "good delivery bar", that's how much you'd get for it in the big exchanges. (Note that "good delivery bars" are a lot bigger than that, though, generally around 1000 troy ounces, currently about $15K per bar.)
However, the coins are worth more if you DON'T melt and refine them in the current market. Gather enough silver coins to be worth $1000 or $10000 at today's silver price -- that's actual value, not face value -- and you can sell them to the big dealers for 12 or more times face value. To buy them back from those same big dealers, you'll pay 13 or 14 times face value, because the dealers need to make money.
Gold coins currently have a melt value about 61.5 times their face value. You can sometimes buy common $5, $10 or $20 gold coins for not too much more than melt value. $1 and $2.5 coins have more numismatic value unless they're severely damaged, $3 coins are quite expensive, and $4 patterns and $50 commemoratives are stratospheric.
The spot value of the silver in $1.00 worth of silver quarters (or dimes or half dollars) is around $11. If you melted them down, refined them into .999 silver, and cast that silver as part of a "good delivery bar", that's how much you'd get for it in the big exchanges. (Note that "good delivery bars" are a lot bigger than that, though, generally around 1000 troy ounces, currently about $15K per bar.)
Oh, so that's what you meant.
Face value is less than melt value is less than actual sale price. Okay, that works.
I'm always careful about 'commemorative' coins. There's a number of people who tried to invest in Franklin Mint stuff and lost their asses doing it. As one site puts it, 'do your homework'.
I don't read AC A human right
It exchanges your money for quarters so that you can do your laundry and is open past 4 PM so that you can actually get to it.
It's also worth clarifying that we're talking about US silver coins of standard composition, not Franklin Mint "sterling" or "layered" or "gold/platinum edition" dreck. US silver is reliably 90% silver, 10% copper.
The US Mint does (still) produce official commemorative coins each year. Usually, it's half-dollars minted in copper-nickel clad composition, dollars minted in the same size and composition as traditional silver dollars (26.73 g of 90% silver, 10% copper), and gold $5 coins minted in the same size and composition as traditional half eagles (8.36 g of 90% gold, 10% copper). There are also oddities like the First Spouse series (1/2 troy ounce of .999 gold), last year's Kennedy commemorative half (3/4 troy ounce of .999 gold), and whatnot.