Man Gets Prison for Stealing Millions of Coins

welcome once again to Leto's law here's Steve lato ever use a coin star the machines at the store where you dump on all your change and you get most of your money back but in a more usable form than all those loose coins well crazy story John sent me and the story is not that long but it's one of those things that makes you wonder man sentenced in Oregon for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in coins in coins Austin the deals wrote this for The Oregonian a 34 year old man from Las Vegas uh was convicted of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in coins after being caught in Vancouver and he's now been sentenced to four years in federal prison and it was a traveling uh series of crimes the man was part of a scheme to steal money from coin cashing machines in grocery stores and other businesses in multiple States they think that he got an estimated 715 thousand dollars that they know of and uh that's out of coin cashing machines according to the U.S attorney's Office in a statement out of a district in Oregon the man was also ordered to pay around 582 thousand dollars in rest uh restitution and I believe if you add up all the numbers in the story it kind of comes out to be where theoretically uh someone's made whole here but he was arrested in Clark County back in December of 21. and the allegation is that he was disguising himself as an employee of the coin cash and Company the company owns the machines and I've mentioned a long time ago that I have a metal detector occasionally go out and do some metal detecting and I've done a couple videos where I talked about that and so if you metal detect and you save all the coins that you find you wind up with a lot of coins after a while and so I had buckets literally big tins and buckets filled with coins and I moved one time and I'm like I'm not moving like a hundred pounds of pennies that are all late Memorial pennies they're worth a penny a piece like there's no need to save them and so I would take them into a coin store and dump them into the machine and cash them in that way and um I actually put so many coins into one machine I actually jammed the machine and at one point I had to go get a manager and say hey uh the machine got jammed I thought I was gonna get in trouble the guy came over and he opens it up and he kicks it a few times and closes and goes there you go and and it started working again and I jokingly said something about the machine and how I was overworking it the guy goes I don't care it's not my machine and I go really and he goes yeah yeah he goes he goes they just pay us to put it here so the company at least with that particular machine in that store was not owned by the store it was owned by the company and they simply paid to have the machine put there I don't know they paid a flat rate per month or they paid a portion of what it brought in don't know but it was owned and operated by someone else now the store manager had a key to where he could open it up and mess with it but the maintenance and then the removal of the money was handled by somebody else that's where the scam comes in here so the man pretended to be servicing the machines he would then walk away with the machine's Coin Vault the attorney's office said so he'd come in dressed like he was with the company go over the machine just in broad daylight like no cares in the world and get the machine open remove the coin box close the machine and walk away now the machine I'm assuming would not work properly missing a major part like that so it may have then indicated it was out of order or something somebody then calls the coin company and say hey the guy who came out today to maintain the machine damaged it it's not working anymore they go what guy we didn't send anybody out to work on that machine so official said the man started stealing coins as far as they know back in January of 21 and continued this scheme and route from his home in Las Vegas all the way up to a grocery store in Vancouver where an employee called the police when Clark County sheriff's deputies searched the man's rented cars and hotel room they found the disguise he used tools to break into the machines and laundry baskets and bags filled with millions of coins millions of coins now you'll notice it says they were searching his hotel room as a rental car and it was Clark County Sheriffs and I don't know if the bust went down in Vancouver or someplace else but it involved people from Clark County investigators seized about 1.5 million stolen coins which they say had a face value of about a hundred and thirty three thousand dollars at that time on March 10 2022 a Federal grand jury in Portland indicted him on conspiring with others to transport as well as transporting stolen money he pleaded guilty on Mark 10th of this year so apparently there were others involved at least that's the theory and they were all involved in this scheme where a guide put on a disguise and a fake uniform walk into the store up to the Coinstar machine or whatever brand it is and pretend to be servicing it and then walk out with the coin box and then when they're done they've got all this money which raises the question and and this is not this is not me trying to be a wise ass here but what do you do with all those coins take them to a coin star and it's interesting because I I know people who go I don't want to use a Coinstar I lose money by doing that yeah you do but you also gain the convenience of dumping a bucket of 45 dollars worth of pennies into a thing and having it spit out a receipt that you can go get cash for that's easier to handle okay so you're paying for that convenience if you want to sit there and roll all those coins and write your phone number on the rolls and take them to bank knock yourself out that's that's not fun especially not when it's uh 1.5 million coins what do you do with all those coins take them to the quarter car wash well that'll get rid of your quarters seriously I mean this this is one of those things where these guys probably had all this change sitting around saying well what do we do with it now but I know there's a couple guys in the audience who metal detect and I did a video a few years ago about something I found with my metal detector of Great Value I'll put a link in that the description below because I know some people have joined my channel of late and wouldn't have gone back through all the several thousand videos in my back catalog but I found a very very valuable item which I sold for a lot of money and it was kind of funny because I had just bought that metal detector I've had several I've had several metal detectors in my career and my most recent one the one I still right now is a v3i made by a company called White's electronics and White's Electronics unfortunately folded went out of business during covid for a variety of reasons which is very very sad because they were one of the best companies out there uh and they've been around a long time but um I had just bought that detector to replace a previous one I had earlier that I no longer had and so I bought this detector and it was only the second or third time I brought this detector out and I found this thing that I sold for a lot of money and when I sold that I of course repaid the detector over 10 times and so one of the funniest things is I'll be out metal detecting and people invariably walk over to you and say hey let's go and you find anything you know and the next two things they always ask are have you ever found anything valuable and how much that detector cost and so if I tell them I say well the detector cost you know almost two thousand dollars they go wow and then if they've seen what I found that day and I just got a pocket full of change they kind of look at it kind of like okay this guy's an idiot because he's found like a dollar fifty and change and he paid almost two thousand dollars for that detector but see if they ask the other question have you ever found anything of value I say yes I found one item that paid this detector off ten times ten times but the real thing here is that metal detecting is not about making money it's I would draw the parallel to it's like fishing go up to a fisherman who's out on a boat in his bass boat and see what the boat cost you well your fishing equipment cost you okay how much gas you use today okay how many fish have you caught okay you realize that if I went to a store I could just buy those fish yeah yeah yeah the the guy knows that it's not what fishing is about you're not out there trying to save money by getting your fish that way uh it's the thrill of casting and seeing if something hits something hits what is it and trying to figure out how to get the best results and so the cool thing about metal detector is for me is I see some place and I go you know I bet there's something there and I go and I look not always right but once in a while I am so last summer the first day I got my metal detector out last summer I found three Indian Head pennies and a buffalo nickel the very next day I returned to the same spot and I found an 1845 large scent that's a penny about that big 1845. very very cool coin very unusual to find one with metal detector it's only the fifth one I found in my career but what's it worth the condition I found it maybe 10 maybe 20 bucks maybe maybe I can go to a coin store and buy one for 10 bucks right I could but it's different I was just walking along and I found it the reason I found it is that it occurred to me I should check that spot to see what's there that coin has been in the ground probably for a hundred years or more and and how many people have walked over it and didn't know it was there and I'm the one who found it and has it in my collection now so that's pretty cool but getting back the guy with the coin star he's got all these coins what's he gonna do with them and so that to me is the big question Med explained why he had laundry baskets filled with coins in his hotel room hadn't figured out yet that end of the equation so man sentenced in Oregon for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in coins Austin Deus wrote that for The Oregonian John sent it thanks a lot questions your comments put them below let's talk to you later bye-bye thank you for watching Leto's law is it better to have something that you don't need than to need something you don't have

Channel: Steve Lehto

Views: 44,183

Keywords: lemon law, michigan lemon law, lemon law attorney, lemon law lawyer, http://www.lehtoslaw.com, steve lehto

Id: y_PPAPiUrnA

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2023