Unplug the gizmo that actually counts the cars entering and leaving the lot.
Profit!
That’s really all there was to it. There was another part of not printing out a receipt, which was supposed to be another check against abuse, but hey, that was optional anyway! Or, it it wasn’t, there was no way to check it it was being abuse in any way.
It’s unclear how this was discovered, but the article says that the inventor of the scam told all the other employees so they could steal too. Some of them did, and they estimate total losses to be around $1.5 million. But somebody ratted them out.
Come to America, where even parking lot attendants can achieve their dreams, if only they can keep their mouths shut!
Actually, it was stolen by a contractor to whom the government had privatized the parking services. It sounds like the company (PMI) is going to have to make good on the stolen funds that aren’t recovered from the private contractor’s employees.
The parking fee there is usurious anyway (15 bucks!!), so I don’t have a whole lot of heartburn over the gummint losing out on it. I mean, I do, because the money was stolen, but…
PMI is one of the two or three big parking management companies around here. They can suck it up and pay the government back for the theft.
Parking-lot theft is the reason that Metro garages have all gone to electronic payment only (this happened 8-9 years ago).
This reminds me of a subway worker who worked in a remote location in his station. He rigged up a device to alert (ie, wake) him whenever his boss was coming. Clever, but wrong. He was found out when someone saw the device and alerted the police to a possible bomb.
I assume he wasn’t doing this for every car, because people would be suspicious if the total receipts for any day was zero. But you’d think they’d notice that the receipts for this lot only were coming up short of expectations.
If not, what was his supervisor doing every day?
It appears that the “supervisor” was the gizmo that got unplugged, and also somebody who was back at the office who totaling up the time sheets. The story mentions that there was nothing in the contract between the Smithsonian and the parking company about meeting expected revenue numbers, so the company didn’t give a shit and the Smithsonian didn’t… I dunno what. It seems they never did something even as basic as sitting down with a calculator and estimating what reasonable revenue might be based on parking fees and number of parking slots.
My friend and I did this a few nights ago for shits and giggles. 2,000 slots @$15 is a potential 30 grand a day, plus there’s a pretty good chance that a lot of those slots would turn over 2 or 3 times a day. So the max is getting up into the 100 grand a day neighborhood, but of course neither of us had any idea what kind of traffic there would be during slow times like in mid-winter. The story claims that the thieves pocketed about a third of the fees, but also says they took home “as much as $4,000 a day”. So either that estimate of a third was way high, or slow periods were really pretty damn slow. Or maybe the FBI surveillance didn’t take place during the heaviest part of tourist season.
My favorite author is Donald Westlake. I think it was Bank Shot, but definately one of the Dortmunder series has a scene written in where the the character Stan Murch puts on a red(?) blazer & stands in the driveway of a hotel in NYC. Guy pulls in, gets out & hands his car to the “valet”. As Murch gets in & starts to drive away the guy says, “Wait a sec” & pulls out his wallet & gives him a dollar or two.
My favorite line is, ‘as Murch drives off, he thinks to himself, “It’s not every day someone pays you to steal their car.”’
I was at a festival where one of the vendors was selling a shirt “Please Pay Me” in big letters. I thought* about buying that shirt & standing outside some random private parking lot on a day like July 4th. Getting $20 a car for ½ & getting out of dodge.
Whoops! when they came back, their car was towed because they illegally parked in a private lot. :dubious:
