# And you so nearly got away with it
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-you-so-nearly-got-away-with-it/532252
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
**Created:** [March 12, 2010, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-you-so-nearly-got-away-with-it/532252 "2010-03-12T16:42:22Z")
**Posts on this page:** 10
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@One\_And\_Only\_Wanderers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/One_And_Only_Wanderers)
#### Post date: [March 12, 2010, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-you-so-nearly-got-away-with-it/532252/1 "2010-03-12T16:42:22Z")
linky
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk\_news/england/london/8564741.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/8564741.stm)
2 IT contractors who dealt with roulette machines at a casino, reprogrammed them to spit out winning tikcets regardless of results. No idea how they made it applicable only to them.
They were caught when a cashier noticed a £600 win was impossible for a £10 bet as 35-1 is the best odds available. They had gotten away with £33000 to this point.
This kind of thing always makes me laugh. If only they had made the pay outs for a legitimate amoutn who knows when they would have gotten caught.
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### Author:  [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)
#### Post date: [March 12, 2010, 4:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-you-so-nearly-got-away-with-it/532252/2 "2010-03-12T16:53:04Z")
I saw this time and time again when I was a bank teller. Someone would have a nice little bad check scheme going, and they could have kept it going indefinitely. But they always got greedy, and got caught.
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### Author:  [@BrotherCadfael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrotherCadfael)
#### Post date: [March 12, 2010, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-you-so-nearly-got-away-with-it/532252/3 "2010-03-12T16:57:23Z")
If it weren’t for those meddling kids…
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### Author:  [@Machine\_Elf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machine_Elf)
#### Post date: [March 12, 2010, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-you-so-nearly-got-away-with-it/532252/4 "2010-03-12T18:05:52Z")
> [@](#):
>
> No idea how they made it applicable only to them.
Back in the 90’s, [this guy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Dale_Harris) was doing good, going undetected. He had rigged slot machines so that they behaved normally until a a particular sequence of bets was made, at which point they would pay out a large jackpot. Later they moved on to rigging keno games; he and his buddy got greedy and tried to cash a big winning keno ticket, attracting official scrutiny, which led to jail time. Oops.
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### Author:  [@Shot\_From\_Guns](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shot_From_Guns)
#### Post date: [March 12, 2010, 6:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-you-so-nearly-got-away-with-it/532252/5 "2010-03-12T18:29:49Z")
> [@tdn](#):
>
> I saw this time and time again when I was a bank teller. Someone would have a nice little bad check scheme going, and they could have kept it going indefinitely. But they always got greedy, and got caught.
To be fair, you obviously don’t have any data on the ones that didn’t get caught. So there’s no way to tell that they “always” got greedy.
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### Author:  [@EvilTOJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EvilTOJ)
#### Post date: [March 13, 2010, 12:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-you-so-nearly-got-away-with-it/532252/6 "2010-03-13T00:09:41Z")
> [@BrotherCadfael](#):
>
> If it weren’t for those meddling kids…
Dammit this was post 3! We’re so predictable sometimes.
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### Author:  [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)
#### Post date: [March 13, 2010, 12:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-you-so-nearly-got-away-with-it/532252/7 "2010-03-13T12:53:39Z")
And that damned talking dog!
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### Author:  [@don\_t\_ask](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/don_t_ask)
#### Post date: [March 13, 2010, 12:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-you-so-nearly-got-away-with-it/532252/8 "2010-03-13T12:59:05Z")
Don’t blame the IT contractors. I’ve worked with lots of contractors and I can assure you that it wasn’t their fault. It was the idiots in charge of Quality Assurance testing.
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### Author:  [@Napier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Napier)
#### Post date: [March 13, 2010, 1:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-you-so-nearly-got-away-with-it/532252/9 "2010-03-13T13:31:23Z")
The people who programmed gasoline pumps to meter nonlinearly are my heros.
Gas pumps get checked with 5 gallon or 10 gallon or 15 gallon reference containers. So these guys programmed a periodic error into the pumps that was zero at even integer multiples of 2.5 gallons and maximized at odd integer multiples of 2.5. Customers who bought 5 or 10 or 15 gallons got a square deal, but everybody else got cheated more or less.
This instance of malfeasance in the Fourier domain is kinda perfect…
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### Author:  [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)
#### Post date: [March 13, 2010, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-you-so-nearly-got-away-with-it/532252/10 "2010-03-13T16:15:52Z")
Awesome. Do not not trifle with the smart ones.
Got any more details or a link?
I suppose it’s pretty inconceivable that there might be any leakage in the financial plumbing of the various exchanges & investment banks. Not much money there, and very few smart people either. Naah; couldn’t be.