Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna

Over 13 years, one man stole $2.3 million in fares from Edmonton LTR one coin at a time using a car antenna and magnet.

Maintaining public transit ticket machines is crucial to keeping cities moving but not a job that would normally generate headlines. That is unless you’re Salim Kara, who for 13 years used a car antenna and magnet to pilfer $ 2.3 million of fares from Edmonton’s LTR, one coin at a time. Finally caught in 1994, Salim’s salami-slicing style scam had netted him 37 tonnes of small change and minor celebrity status. Here’s the fascinating story of Salim Kara’s coin scam in full.

Originally from Uganda but of East Indian descent, Salim Kara fled Idi Amin’s regime in 1972 for England, eventually migrating to Canada and settling in Edmonton, the capital of the province of Alberta.

Magnet fishing for coins

In 1981, Kara was hired on a $ 38k-a-year salary to maintain and fix the 68 ticket machines of Edmonton’s LRT – light rail transit system. From the get-go, it seems Salim wasn’t satisfied with being paid $17.66 per hour, so began supplementing his pay by pilfering a portion of the fares.

As Kara only maintained the machine function, he didn’t have direct access to the cash box where the coins were collected after customers had fed them to purchase LRT tickets. 

Working alone and at night, he developed a simple yet ingenious method for fishing those coins out. 

He removed the face plate from the ticket machines, which as a repairman would raise no suspicion, then rigged a car antenna with a magnetic tip, like a make-shift fishing rod. Coin-by-coin, Kara hooked his catch out of the ticketing machine cash box into a shaving bag, which acted as his keep net.

Banking his heavy booty

Salami-slicing scams focus on stealing tiny amounts of money in the hope that the size of the theft makes it unnoticeable. Coin clipping, the removal of small slithers of silver or gold coins, is the original salami-slicing scam, dating back to Roman times, but ended around the 17th century as coin designs became more sophisticated and eventually of no intrinsic value. 

The digital age opened up a new era of salami-slicing opportunities, the best of which we’ve summarised in a separate article on computer crimes, but it is unusual for modern salami-slicing type scams to focus on coins. 

Cash is king where organised criminals are concerned, given its untraceable nature, but their preference is for high-value bank notes.

Salim Kara was no King Pin; just a petty criminal with a unique gift and the patience to play the long game, quietly siphoning coins day by day over more than a decade and creating a convincing cover story to enable him to launder the proceeds.

Kara told his bank that he ran a successful machine-vending business. News reports estimated that he stole an average of $3k a week over 13 years, but Kara’s scheme received a boost in 1987 when Canada introduced the $1 loonie, almost doubling his weekly take.

Like an urban pirate, soon Kara was lugging $900 home daily in loot and around $5k a week.

Such was the scale of coins that Kara accumulated that his bank allowed him to drag his booty through the back door and even considered expanding their vault to accommodate the volume of coinage Kara was regularly hauling in.

Edmonton Journal, December 2010

Kara’s coin-powered property empire

Over time the proceeds from Salim Kara’s scam began to pile up, so he began investing, including a house in Victoria and two other houses in Edmonton. He also sunk $ 1 million into a term deposit but could crucially keep his distance from these visible signs of wealth.

Perhaps one of the main reasons why Kara could maintain his grift so long was being smart enough to keep a low profile locally, helped by the image he presented driving a dilapidated 1977 Chevrolet Malibu.

Sooner or later, the temptation to spend became too much and maybe thinking he would never get caught in 1992, Kara decided to trade up from his modest $136,000 home to something much more fitting of a vending-machine millionaire.

His mountain of coins financed the building of a $ 1 million house in an exclusive area of Edmonton with five bedrooms, five bathrooms, an indoor jacuzzi, a steam room, an indoor fountain and a garage for four cars with a built-in car wash.

If asked about the source of his funds, Kara claimed to have sold properties in England and made various claims to be employed in investment banking or owning a computer repair business. 

All good things come to an end

Kara was effectively stealing 20% of LRT fares over the 13-year period; one in five coins that were fed into the machines by the paying public ended up in his shaving bag, amounting to around 2 million customer journeys. It seems inconceivable that he wasn’t caught sooner.

The failure to catch him, despite discrepancies between fares and cash raised in two audits, was put down to a belief that the errors were software glitches and, after his arrest, led to a significant amount of internal finger-pointing.

There were suspicions and even video-taped evidence of Kara acting very strangely a year before he was finally caught, but inadequate processes for whistleblowing meant that it took another year for the alarm to be finally raised. 

In 1993, with the red flags mounting up, the city authorities hired private investigators to observe Kara, which finally caught him in the act. In March 1994, he sliced off the final piece of this very lucrative salami.

‘There are about 600,000 people living in the city. You have stolen from every citizen, man, woman and child approximately $4 each.’ Associate Chief Justice, A.H. Wachowich commented ahead of passing down the sentence.

As Kara repaid the proceeds of his scam to cover the city’s insurers, he was released after 16 months. 

Given the fascinating nature of the crime, the length of time it was maintained and the lifestyle it financed, there were rumours of a book deal, but to date, that hasn’t materialised. 

Before his sentencing in March 1996, Kara made an enigmatic statement in court, promising at some point to share his side of this fascinating tale “Remember, every coin has two sides”

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Sources

Associated Press, March 26th, 1996

The Edmonton Journal ,Sep 28, 1994; March 26, 1996; June 4, 1996; December 27th, 2010