A Heist Unfit for Hollywood

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,682552,00.html

Last Saturday in Berlin, a heist of epic proportions took place. Four men, a machete, a pistol, and 250,000 Euros. That's right, four dudes ran into a "big poker tournament in the center of Berlin" with a gun and a haggard machete and stole all the cash. While making off with a pile of dough, almost $340,000 in USD, these poor criminals didn't really wow their audience or portray their superb planning as well as they should have, as police at the scene described the robbery as "chaotic and amateurish." They also apparently left behind a mountain of evidence, including being filmed by many of the people attending the tournament, and one of the guys was tackled by a security guard before he could even escape. In their defense, though, the timing was very good: The whole robbery only took five minutes, and had they waited just a little bit longer, the money would have been in a safe and out of their grasp. Also, the private security who was guarding the cash was unarmed. Holding heists is harder these days with improved security measures and electronic locks and the such, so these four masterminds at least get an A for effort.

This was easily my favorite current event to read for German yet. When I imagine a heist, I imagine some grand bank with patrons in Gucci clothes withdrawing thousands of dollars, then a squad of guys in jumpsuits or uniform busting in with automatic rifles and taking the place down. These guys did it with a pistol and a freaking machete that you could probably buy at a flea market or Home Depot. If nothing else, they have my respect for scraping together enough weapons to take advantage of the security flaw on such short notice. I'm sure they will all be caught very soon though, especially if one of their buddies got tackled and arrested before they even got to the getaway car... or bike or whatever they had. And it would have been so much cooler had they dressed up like the heist in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

Criminals Steal Account Numbers Using One-Cent Transfers

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,681030,00.html

In Germany (as well as America), it is common practice to simply pay bills online: you go to your bank's website, click a couple buttons, and boom, you're done. Money is taken into and out of bank accounts every moment of every day, and scammers have found a new way to exploit this convenience once again. The newest scam on German interwebs is for a scammer to take a few Euros (remember, one Euro is still 100 cents) and attempt to transfer one cent to any number of randomly-generated account numbers. Most of these generated numbers come back as nonexistent, of course, but when a transfer does manage to go through, the scammer knows he's hit a big, fat paycheck. They use the account numbers that they have acquired and start making withdrawals. Sometimes the scammer will simply wipe the account, but smarter scammers only take a little bit at a time. The online banking system does not have a checkpoint to see whether the person making the withdrawal is actually the account holder, so the responsibility of finding out if someone is sapping your account is the solely that of the account holder.

Shocking as this all is, it is my understanding that we're safe from this type of scam in the US. The way this scam works is through a loophole in a German law that passed last year, which helps money travel faster because "banks are no longer required to check if the name and account number on a transfer slip match." In short, the criminal can just make up a name and take money with little risk on their part. Fortunately for consumers, one can cancel a fraudulent transfer up to 13 months after it happens, so as long as they keep close tabs on their bank records, they will more than likely be safe. This doesn't bode so well for the average Joe (or maybe it's Josef in Germany) who doesn't religiously watch their online banking, however. Despite this not being a problem in America yet, I think the moral of the story is that we should all keep our hard-earned dough under constant surveillance, because a good scammer can find ways to steal that dough in ways we would have never thought of before.