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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.
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"
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.
I imagine that the tricky bit is that, legally, the penalties increase drastically when you shift from 'stealing nothing' to 'stealing something', so there's an incentive to either not touch so much as a few quarters for the parking meter; or make off with enough loot to be worth the risk and effort required to circumvent whatever security measures are in place.
The only exception would be if security and audits were pitifully lax; and you knew that discrepancies of under 1% by weight are classified as 'eh, close enough, the coins probably dried out a bit in storage...' in which case the risk would be so low that the reward wouldn't have to amount to much. In the presence of greater risk, the fact that you don't have to steal all that much for it to qualify as a felony(and that the Federal Reserve, and Brinks, probably like to make examples in order to discourage copycat offenders) would make stealing modest amounts a pretty harrowing business.
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.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.)
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
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/
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.
I would think a front would only be necessary for a long-term ongoing scam where you had a limitless supply of coins. $196,000 sounds like a lot of money, but the big jar on my dresser when filled usually yields close to $500 when I cash them in.
The safe thing to do would not be looking for a way to cash them all in quickly, but to cash in $2000 a month at varied locations in approximately $500 lots. $2000 a month in tax-free cash would make a nice boost in income and could be used for dining out and other common cash purchases, and the amount is probably low enough to not attract any scrutiny.
You could probably even use the same location with the right attitude and a believable narrative, like you own a couple of vending machines in your business lunchroom or laundry machines in your apartments, or you have a freelance business that brings in quarters and don't want to deal with banks.
My only real concern wouldn't be getting caught because cashing in a lot of quarters is suspicion of a theft but that the coin-op business is notorious for involvement by organized crime and tax evasion. The IRS may review coin-cashing business records looking for tax evasion patterns.
I also wonder if it would be possible to just open a business banking account for a phony front business like a laundry or car wash and just take the coins to the bank. You'd have to pay taxes and make it look legitimate on paper, but it would be a perfect front for just using the bank for cashing in the coins.
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.
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.
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.