The technician allegedly stole $300K in cash
A technician assigned to handle Opal card top-up machines is due to be sentenced after he pleaded guilty to larceny for stealing cash from the ticketing units. The worker based in NSW allegedly learned to hack the mechanisms inside the units, allowing him to steal around $300,000 in cash.
The maintenance worker, who was hired by a government contractor, reportedly interfered with Opal machines’ cash storage and transfer systems at least 15,000 times. The incidents allegedly took place between January 2018 and March 2019. At the time, a co-worker found him “acting suspiciously”.
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An internal investigation showed the man’s pattern of behaviour while servicing the machines. His employer reportedly corroborated the findings through a series of observations, using CCTV footage; the suspect’s use of machine access codes; and the GPS records of his travels using the company-assigned vehicle.
Investigators also learned later on that the sum of money missing from some top-up machines matched the amount of money deposited into the employee’s personal bank account on certain days. Moreover, even after the employee was reprimanded through a suspension, he was allegedly able to manipulate the machines five more times.
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“Although maintenance technicians had access to the machines generally, they did not have the keys to access that part of the machine where the cash was kept,” the NSW District Court heard. The maintenance worker in question, however, was said to have developed a technique for interfering with the transfer of paper bills from a cash drawer to a vault.
During such process, the accused would purportedly open one of the covers. “When a cover was lifted, the mechanical process of transfer of a single note at a time was interrupted which resulted in the note’s progress from recycle drawer to vault being halted at some point along the transfer mechanism. This permitted access to a single note which one could then remove,” the court learned.
