Free money from Coke machines

[Piig]

I remember when i was about 12 (10 years ago), i was taken on holiday to Orlando, Florida by my mum.

We stayed at the Holiday Inn on International Drive.

Whilst being 12 and extremely bored with sunbathing, my sister and i decided to go and find something to do around the hotel.

For some unknown reason i tried putting my hand UP a coke machine. On the roof of the compartment where the drinks drop out from, you could fit in two fingers through some golfball sized holes. To my amazement, i felt a number of banknotes literally resting on the on the top of this compartment where the drinks drop out. So i fiddled about and managed, easily, to pull a number of dollar notes out of the coke machine. Then it suddenly occured to me that there were approximately 20-30 coke machines situated around the hotel complex. Now of course, i am aware that this could be classed as theft and i put all the notes back, but has anyone else ever found this? and can you still do it?

The UK coke machines dont do this, but then again you cant put notes in a UK coke machine.
I sear this is true. I guess coca cola may have cottoned on now as this was over a decade ago, but how cool is that!

[ticker]

A little OT but it reminds me of when I was a student. We had a laundry in the basement of our building with the usual array of coin operated washers and driers. On one drier there was a small gap just above the money box which was normally covered by a chrome trim. Needless to say it didn't take long to realise that if you inserted a strip of cardboard in the gap you could catch the coins as they fell. The place was littered with torn off strips of detergent boxes.

[Piig]

what do you mean a little OT?

[Shagnasty]

It means "Off Topic" or a little deviation from your original thread.

[manhattan]

Ummm, is there really a question here?

[Flypsyde]

manny, I think he's asking if you can still rob machines this way.
I don't think the newer machines will allow you to do this. I've had to open and restock a machine before, and the bill taker actually folds the bills up into a neat little contraption that's directly behid the slot you put the bills in. It is possible, though, that the person stocking the machine may have put some bills into a reserve pan near the bottom of the machine. There's a sort of bucket thing near the bottom that catches the overflow coins, I think, and I know that we put bills in there when the bill taker got full or we needed to buy change from the machine.

[manhattan]

Thanks, Flyp. I'm apparently a little spacey today.

[Piig]

hold on a second....

I didnt "rob" the machines. I dont think i should be perceived as a crim just beacuse i was intuative enough discover the lack of security on coke machines!! Plus i was 12 and a fistful of dollars to me was the equivalent of a million pounds! i was right chuffed when i found them.

I always put the money back! honest guv!! heheheheheee....

[voltaire]

Did anyone else ever employ the use of saltwater when they were trouble-making little kids?

I don't think I'll elaborate much further than that...

[Piig]

oh aye man,

salt water + slugs = hours of fun.

is that what you mean?

[Little Nemo]

At the risk of having another thread closed because it discusses criminal techniques, I think voltaire was refering to the fact that salt water = slugs as far as many older vending machines are concerned.

[Piig]

lets not exaggerate this.

I/we are not discussing criminal techniques. I think it is quite funny actually that you used to be able to do this. this is a light hearted anecdote that i thought i'd share with you.

I am not instructing people to break open coke machines, i am not divulging secret company knowledge, i just thought it was humerous that not only did coke machines dispense fine liquid refreshment, but the also gave you money too! still makes me laugh.

[Flypsyde]

Well, hell, once a felon, always a felon...

Piig, the salt water can be used, in some machines of an older vintage, to short out the contacts of the machine and dup it into "thinking" you've paid. Soda for salt water.

Just in case Nemo's explanation was a little confusing.

Yes, manny, I'll go quietly.

[Flypsyde]

Don't worry, Piig, we're not going to turn you in, and you gave the money back anyway. Just having a bit of fun with you.

[Piig]

oh cool.

i didnt know that about saltwater and that.

will try it in our office machine! failing that i have a sledgehammer in my stolen car that i use for ram raiding.

[Inky-]

In college I had a job filling and servicing (no smart allec comments please) soda machines, and know the internal structure pretty well. Needless to say banknotes shouldn't be in the storage area at all, and I suspect either:

A...The person who fills and collects the money forgot to replace the "basket" in which bills are fed into, and probably was pretty surprised when he next opened the machine to fill it.

B...The bills are fed into the "basket" via a little rubber conveyor belt-like thing. It's possible that belt was somehow pointing outside the basket and thus dumping the bills inside the machine.

C...Least plausable of all. The service technician placed the money there while restocking the coin dispensor and forgot it there (really unlikely).

My best guess would be "A".

[Piig]

yeah but the curious thing was, that all 20/30 machines around the hotel ALL had dollar bills lying in the area i've talked about, all of them.

It would be some coincidence if all the coke machines had got so full that all their money boxes had started overflowing. Was it not the case that in the 1980's the machines internal designs just basically werent very good??

[Inky-]

All of them? That blows my theory. And you didn't take advantage of it (you've more will power than me)?

You might be right about 80's design bieng different, back then they could be fooled with photocopied dollars wheras today they check magnetic signitures on bills.

[Jebediah]

Magnetic signatures? No shit? I thought I read about a guy a few years ago who counterfitted money with a really good HP color laser printer and rice paper. I thought he said the copies worked in most vending machines. The HP printers had to be installed with a microchip after that to detect when money was being printed, and black it out. Plus, I didn't think our money had any magnetic stuff, except maybe the new tens and twenties and such. Straight Dope?

[handy]

On Old Coke machines you can do this & some other things, not the new ones though.

[voltaire]

I have it on good authority (OK I'll admit it, it's my friend's little brother) that the saltwater technique is still viable in the newer machines if introduced via the bill changer. And NO, I didn't tell the little vandal how to do it.

I never will forget the first time I used the saltwater technique. I was on a night mission with a bunch of friends who were taking my word for it that it would work. Since, I had never actually done it myself, I was sort of expecting to be let down. That all went out the window as soon as the machine started spitting out cans of soda and change as if it were a Vegas slot machine! Somehow we managed to survive that one without getting shocked, because the machine was sizzling and sparking and all the lights were changing colors. In the end we had a bag so heavy with cans that we could hardly carry it! Luckily, the machine was kind of outta the way because it was rather loud from the cans falling down as fast as we could grab them, and the noise from all of us giggling like school girls!

[Johnny Angel]

In our college dorms, they took away the coke machine because people kept salting it.

[eggo]

my (late) friend kornfeid wrote an articlt about this very subject for the first issue of our little e-zine. check out the link on my sig if you want to read it.

[manhattan]

You guys are just doing this because you know I haven’t had an aneurysm for about three years, right? ;)

[Mr. Sheepshead]

Jebediah, yes our (paper) money happens to be magnetic. Grab a good strong magnet and dangle a bill in front of it. Scares the shit out of people!

[JBurton99]

It's not so much the paper that has something
magnetic in it, but it's the ink that is magnetic
right? I thought i saw a show on the Discovery
Channel, or The Learning Channel about that.
Although that would make for a neat bar trick
wouldn't it? :D Hey, watch this bill scoot
across the bar following my hand.

[Little Nemo]

My comment about this thread being shut down for describing criminal methods was intended as a joke. It was a reference to the closing of the money laundering thread a few weeks back. Other posters and myself responded to a question about how money was "laundered" by describing how organized crime outfits did so by operating overseas banks and casinos. The thread was closed done with the stated reason that the board could be liable for any crimes committed with methods described here. I then started a thread pointing out how unlikely it was that any poster was going to commit a crime that had the prerequisite of buying a Las Vegas casino or Cayman Island bank. Someone deciding to salt down a Pepsi machine on the other hand - that I can see happening.

[astro]

The HP printers had to be installed with a microchip after that to detect when money was being printed, and black it out


Soooo. If I buy a HP color laser (I should be so blessed) it has a "microchip" designed to "detect" money being printed. Really?! Do you have a cite for this. Pardon me for being cynical but this smells like a UL to me. Maybe it's true but I can't imagine how they would accomplish this feat of detection and implement in hardware economically.

[astro]

How strong does this magnet have to be? I have a heavy and powerful (1 inch wide with 2.5 inch diameter)magnet from a stripped speaker assembly on my metal filing cabinet and just for laughs tried it per your suggestion with a 1 and a new 20 dollar bill. Absolutely no attraction.



Jebediah, yes our (paper) money happens to be magnetic. Grab a good strong magnet and dangle a bill in front of it. Scares the shit out of people!

[gillygirl]

"were magnetic strips put in u.s. currency so the feds could track your money?"
url: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_030.html

(sorry, dont know how to paste links and all that fancy stuff yet LOL)

[matt_mcl]

Astro: I worked in a photocopy place with a colour copier which would block out not only money, but passports and even postage stamps. I have no idea how it recognized them, but it did. One time Joe, the copy guru, had to make a copy of something with the figure of a bill on it (for perfectly legitimate reasons), and was unable to do it. Go, and doubt no more.

[DougC]

- - - Or maybe not. The scanner I have right next to my computer scans bills at 1200 dpi just like everything else. The cheesy photo-chop software edits it (or not) just the same as anything else, and the $129 printer prints it out, just like anything else. In this case I put someone else's head on it, and I didn't bother to print the back side, but all that doesn't seem like anything difficult.
- Also in St Louis, a 16 yr-old got busted for counterfeiting currency using exactly this method some months back.
- Also the grocery store I work at has had a few instances of people trying to spend computer-printed twenties; two of those attempts were sucessful, even though the printing on the fake bills looked pale and fuzzy when compared next to real ones. - MC

[AWB]

Piig:
I didnt "rob" the machines. I dont think i should be perceived as a crim just beacuse i was intuative enough discover the lack of security on coke machines!! Plus i was 12 and a fistful of dollars to me was the equivalent of a million pounds! i was right chuffed when i found them.

I always put the money back! honest guv!! heheheheheee....


A little translation, please:
"crim" - criminal; OK, I got that.
"right chuffed" - surprised?
"a fistful of dollars to me was the equivalent of a million pounds" - funny, I didn't think US bills (notes as you said before) weighed that much. Oh, you mean exchange rate. Hmmm, even 30 USD would be only 20 pounds. (I forgot you use kilometers to measure weight/mass. Or is that Kelvins?)
"guv" - governor? Nope, just a computer programmer.

[Jophiel]

and the $129 printer prints it out, just like anything else
I think the problem was that the HP printer(s) in question were able to print at a high enough resolution that the bill was actually passable and fairly indistinguishable from a real bill. A printer that can't make a decent copy of a bill due to color or resolution wouldn't need such protection on it.

Of course, by "decent copy", I mean one that would fool a bank, vending machine/bill changer or a Federal agent, not one that will pass under the nose of a bored Safeway cashier.

[xizor]

I had heard it was a Cannon printer, not an HP. The model number was either 510 or 810. And I checked the snopes website and it wasn't listed there, so maybe there is some truth to it.

[vandal]

I always put the money back! honest guv!!

How exactly did you accomplish this?

If you pulled out the dollar through those two little holes you described in the OP, it would be quite difficult, if not, impossible, to put the dollar back through those same holes.

If you fed the dollar back into the machine, then you would be stealing a can of coke, since, the dollar you used already came from the machine.

So, how did you do it?

[Suspicious mind]

right chuffed - extremely pleased with oneself
12 year old with 20 quid - surely the richest kid in the playground
guv - governor. Much loved slang of cockneys, used to address someone respectfully. e.g. Look guv, I can 'av a look at yer drains on Thursd', but I can't get the materials for the roof until next week.
honest guv - purposefully ironic admission of guilt.

[Edward The Head]

There is another way, or at least there used to be a way to get money AND stuff out of any vending machine. I don't however think it works now.

Take the clear packing tape that is as wide as a dollars width. Take two pieces of tape about 1'-1.5' long. tape to one side and then place them together so that there is no sticky side. this makes a bill with basically a long "string" on it. then let it run through the machine and pull back out. this will give change and product. but liek I said I don't think it works anymore.

[Scruloose]

Is it possible that the bills were put there by employees? One place I worked, we had a Coke machine. We kept the profit, and the Coke distributer brought more sodas and kept their share (or something like that). Anyway, one of our guys had the keys to stock the machine, and would often open it up to give people change who didn't have any. I don't believe the machine we had took dollar bills, so much of the change went back into the machine, but the bills were left somewhere in the machine. Maybe the machines you speak of, didn't take dollar bills.

©

[Piig]

Vandal,

In some cases it may have been the case that some of the dollars jumped of their own accord into my pocket or at least into the slot of the change machine that stood in the corner of the hotel games room. In fact, oh yeah, thats what happened all the time!

BTW, been at Le Mans this last week, it was first class! Any of you lot been b4??

[Gunslinger]

...because all the vending machines around here are well-lit and out in the open ;)
Anyway, I read somewhere that if you get a $1 bill, and make a tear about 1" long into the side 1/3 of the way down (say, at the end of the block containing the words "ONE DOLLAR" on the front), you can get a free coke. The machine swallows the bill far enough to be "paid" and dispense the product, then spits it out because of the tear. Like I said, I've never tried it, but I've heard that it works.
Slightly OT, but in the spirit of the thread: the pay phones at my high school didn't keep your money--they'd drop the coins out the return slot a few seconds after hanging up. Everybody knew (including the administration, who I assume put the phones up to make money), but nobody ever fixed 'em. Is this a genuine malfunction, or d'ya think the admin. had them rigged to give us free calls? (maybe to boost morale :confused: )

[StompyGodzilla]

right chuffed - extremely pleased with oneself
12 year old with 20 quid - surely the richest kid in the playground
guv - governor. Much loved slang of cockneys, used to address someone respectfully. e.g. Look guv, I can 'av a look at yer drains on Thursd', but I can't get the materials for the roof until next week.
honest guv - purposefully ironic admission of guilt.


Oh, hey. My boss calls me 'guv'. I'm really chuffed to learn it means he respects me.

Unless he's just taking the piss.....

:confused:

Stompy