Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022) (opens in new tab)

This is why the Dunkin flip up lid was such a technological innovation: my dad was worried that he’d get reported by a meter maid if they continuously found his junker purple Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight (out of place in the Back Bay) in front of meters with obvious and visible paper jams. The Dunkin lid did just enough to permanently trip the jam sensor while also being removable and reusable. It gave you just enough plausible deniability. For a while there he just kept one in his center console instead of bothering with change machines.

>Extra points for using the orange colored envelope you got with your last parking ticket

Nothing worse than seeing that neon orange envelope under your wiper blade from afar when returning to your car. Those meter maids were like ninjas.

Nobody wants to carry change, so of course they favour the bill rather than the coin.

Canadians didn’t have much interest in carrying the toonie either, but had no choice in the matter.

I don't know, how big is Wall Street nowadays? /s

More seriously: it's likely that there are indeed a lot of "optimally greedy" criminals - it's just that we don't label them criminals, because they don't get caught. I guess the actual numbers are somewhat dependent on your trust in the ability of law enforcement.

> perhaps the consistency of his behavior made it seem 'normal' to the local bankers?

Perhaps it was just the '80s, when banks didn't really want to ask any questions.

> the relationship between intake and risk is probably not linear.

I agree there. Note that criminals do tend to understand this, typically regarding the results of conviction. It's the reason capital punishment is not really a deterrent: because once you pass the threshold (which is often with a single act), punishment does not grow prportionally, so they might as well do it over and over.

Bernie Madoff might be close to an example; his scheme kept going for an _amazingly_ long time, and he made some effort at times to reduce inflow to keep it somewhat under control. There was probably a world in which it only came out after he died; as it was he was kind of unlucky with the timing.

Of course, there might be plenty of optimally greedy criminals out there, and you’ll never know; more or less by definition they do not get caught.

This is the idiocy of committing various forms of graft or embezzlement in the Western world: the rewards are small and short-term compared to the nonzero legal and financial consequences of getting caught. It's that most people are bad at quantifying the probabilities and qualitatively assessing their risk exposure before they're caught and rationalizing they're different and somehow smarter than everyone else at all times. His theft didn't go unnoticed and they eventually had to hire a private detective

Even if someone could steal much quickly the equivalent of, say, a billion dollars without raising any suspicion or leaving any trace evidence and launder it covertly, the problem becomes there is no country to disappear to where the proceeds could be utilized and where property rights are respected: countries including Iceland, Switzerland, Ecuador, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, Belarus, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Qatar, Yemen, China, and DPRK will not help you. One could attempt to live openly, but they would find it difficult to launder their funds from nowhere into the legitimate banking world without inevitably raising suspicions or being caught through forensic accounting.

Therefore, a wise criminal™ is generally better off using legitimized means to facilitate large-scale wealth transfer from people and organizations that lack economic and political power using trickery, obfuscation, and complexity. Either that, or by creating genuine (or genuine-appearing) value and monetizing it well through work that doesn't involve criminality reduces the risk of ending up poor and/or in prison. Apart from specialized IP or knowledge work ability that can be productized as a startup, the areas of real estate, public markets, and fintech are the most obvious targets for non-lifestyle business models. Other non-/semi-lifestyle business models readily achievable by an individual is becoming a B2B supplier of high-value, high-margin specialized goods that present one or more barriers to entry, i.e., aircraft parts, nuclear energy parts, safety systems, or medical devices.

0. https://topclassiccarsforsale.com/chevrolet/288637-1977-chev...

From Wikipedia: The LRT system had an estimated 18,220 weekday passenger boardings in 1978.

If I remember correctly fares ranged somewhere between 35-65 cents in those days.

Also, with 68 fare machines in the city in 1978, how many repairmen do you really need?

While large volumes of transactions have been reported, the agency mostly… well, took reports!

It can be a hard nut to crack and I don’t think governments actually want to find and stop the transnational kind money laundering.

In what country? It maybe possible for tax agency to request access to the transaction history in case of the audit, but I doubt they just get a feed of all transactions.

IIRC, there were mandatory PTO/vacations required as well, so that everyone's job was done by at least 2 different people during the year.

This was not a legal thing, but required for the firm I worked at. My manager at the time said this was pretty common practice on the street, then. (Early/mid 90's.)

While individuals could ask for their vacation time to just be paid out, a lot of employers don’t like that because they budgeted to pay you 100% of your salary per year, not 104% or 106% (ie: paying you for both 52 weeks of work plus whatever weeks of holiday per 52 weeks).

It's also what Sam Bankman-Fried and others did in exchanges that acted as unregulated banks.

The system is not perfect and there are many scandals but if you compare it to what happens in crypto exchanges, its a day and night difference.

Running a machine as intended and screwing up is different from pretending doing one thing and actually doing something else and screwing up. This is also why bankers and fund managers don't usually go to jail when they lose clients money. It's not illegal to suck at your job as long as you follow the rules.

Yes, this is correct. The bank does it in a somewhat government controlled fashion, with checks and balances, which the world has been fighting for a millennia, if not more. And the guy inside does it with stolen money, for personal gain.

Consent, for one, is a difference between the two actions, if we're talking morality.

Retail banks hold their assets in various forms (central bank reserves, bonds etc.) but can’t really ‘invest’ because they can’t accept the risk.

They make most of their money on lending, but can’t actually “lend deposits” because they are on the wrong side of the balance sheet. The bank levers up capital (money that shareholders have put in as well as retained earnings from previous years) to lend from.

Deposits do count as liquidity and are a fairly inexpensive form of it, which is why banks want you to move money into them and pay interest to encourage you to not transfer them out.

If the bank came into your home, took money without your consent, gambled it on high-risk activities, then tried to replace it before you noticed that would also be bad.

But that’s not what banks do. People deposit their money at the bank consensually and with an understanding that the bank’s activities are regulated within relatively strict frameworks.

I don’t understand if you are trying to downplay the severity of criminal embezzlement by bank employees or trying to demonize banks, but the two scenarios you’re equating are nothing alike in terms of consent, regulation, risk, and criminality.

E.g. Kids and seniors get discounts.

There is a pilot project[0] to put turnstiles/gates at two stations, but this is to keep the homeless out of the stations, not to count passengers.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/transit-turnstiles-o...