Posted on 02/27/2018 10:21:20 AM PST by nickcarraway
Since last fall, police in several states have been looking for a man they believe is using a laminated $20 bill attached to some fishing line to steal thousands of dollars from self-serve car washes.
There’s very little information about what exactly happened in this dashcam video, but it appears…
The latest on the multi-state car wash bandit came Monday from the Indianapolis Star, which said the man was caught on surveillance cameras at car washes in the city of Moorseville on Aug. 4 and Jan. 26.
“We’ve only really had two dealings with him, but he’s a large pain,” Mooresville Police Department Detective Donald Kays told the Star.
Apparently the man’s such a pain, that authorities can’t even say how many car washes he’s hit. The suspect’s method is fairly ingenious, per the Star:
On July 10 the man stole $700 from the Splash N Shine in Boardman Township, Ohio, a suburb of Youngstown. Surveillance images released by police show the man holding a bill that appears to be laminated in plastic.
The man “continuously used a $20 bill to trigger a purchase then hit refund,” Boardman Detective Richard Romeo said in a wanted poster urging the public to help identify the thief.
The man canceled the transaction, collected the change and then fished the bill out with a stringlike piece of plastic.
Police concluded the $20 bill has to be laminated, which keeps the machines from shredding it to bits. The trick involves connecting the bill to what appears to be fishing line, Ohio police have said.
The suspect entered the coated $20 bill 35 times and voided each car wash purchase to trigger a refund from the machine. Each time, he was able to pull the coated bill back out of the machine. By the time the thief was done, the machine was missing $700 in $5 bills.
In total, he’s estimated to have netted thousands of dollars, with more than $1,000 coming from just two car washes in Indiana alone.
Weirdly, the suspect conceals his license plate and even wipes away his fingerprints—but he doesn’t cover his face. Police in two states have clear shots of his mug as he pulled the scam.
Authorities in Boardman, Ohio, said last October the suspect’s a white man in his 50s or 60s, heavy-set, balding, and bespectacled. At one point, he drove an early 2000s blue Dodge Grand Caravan.
After several months, the situation has apparently left Mooresville Police Detective Chad Richhart baffled. The detective suggested to Fox 59 in Indiana that the suspect’s probably evaded arrest for so long because he’s “not from around here.”
“These communities he’s hitting, he has no ties to,” Richhart said. “So that’s why nobody can identify him.”
The vending machine company has not been keeping up.
I remember seeing a show on vending machines a few years ago (may have been HOW ITS MADE) where one operation was have a blade to cut any string being used
Jack Benny?
Bandit Takes Car Washes to the Cleaners
there fixed it
I agree. May I suggest we start at the top and work our way down?
First thing I’d check are the employees of the companies that provide/maintain the machines.
We need an all out ban on laminating machines and fishing line.
Or on car washes.
So why doesn’t the second camera get the plate?
DK
That looks like that freak kasich from ohio!!!
Dang it! That facial recognition software is really good.
It even took all my facial hair off! :-{)>
Smart and fully functional are not always synonymous.
“May I suggest we start at the top and work our way down?”
You mean we start in DC then Virginia etc etc ??
My beard just got three inches longer! /Trump mode
lol
Indeed over the years knackers or travelers have stolen tens of thousands stringing my machines
One was caught in a shootout years ago at one of my spots and opened fire on my Vietnam vet pal who confronted him
Cost the stringer his life
He misjudged the Wild Bill Hickock nerve of my buddy who didn’t flinch and took aim with bullets flying by pell mell and dropped him in soon to be large pool of his own blood
Washing that blood pool down the self serve bay drain was needless to say macabre
And guess what
No one claimed the body and never identified
A knacker no doubt
Western North Carolina and Tri cities TN and Arkansas as well have these caravan white gypsies
Used to be a community near Dickson TN but they got run off
Cops have gone to their parks and found a row of coin changers on shelves with little kids being trained to string the machines and confiscated in one case near Johnson City over 300,000 in quarters
That’s 3/4 tonne of quarters
We used to do the 5 dollar bill tied to fishing line trick in the cafeteria in middle school.
Drop it and wait for a teacher to try and pick it up, then yank the string .
Hysterical!
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