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Comment by willcipriano | Hacker News Reader

> In 2015, emails show that Garda employees discussed how to keep TD Bank from learning that a single branch couldn’t find $924,000 of the bank’s coins.

If that was all quarters, that is somewhere in the ballpark of 25 tons of material. That didn't go missing by employees carrying it out in their pockets. You can't run that through the local coin star. How on earth is this possible?

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It's totally possible if it was spread out. $924,000 worth of quarters over 10 years is only 37 rolls per day. That doesn't seem to hard to smuggle out, especially if you have accomplices.

> especially if you have accomplices

Or if you're one of several people all independently stealing quarters.

Yeah I guess at some point people just assume that "a few rolls of quarters a day" is a fringe benefit of the job. Everybody does it so it's okay, right?

That's 20 pounds worth, roughly the weight of a sledgehammer. How do you carry a sledgehammer out of a secure facility every day for a decade?

I bet it’s hard at first but gets easier after your muscles react. :)

You can carry sledgehammer just about anywhere as long as you look like you're supposed to be.

There was a case of a mint worker stealing around 0.5 tons of coins out progressively over time.

https://www.theage.com.au/national/mint-worker-filled-his-bo...

A man smuggled half a tonne of $2 coins out of the Royal Australian Mint in his boots and lunch box and kept notes of when he exchanged the money, a court has been told.

Most likely incompetence. They need to check the inventories on EVERY location at the same day. Perhaps that $1m will appear as surplus on other locations. Perhaps this $1m has been moved over 10 years and 100 different shippings and the paperwork was bad, they loaded the wrong crates, they don't have RFID on each crate, the RFID antenna was offline and didn't pick "that" crate, etc.

Only if they count every single coin/dollar on all their vaults they will be able to ascertain whether the money is lost/stolen, or they just messed up every process/procedure under the sun.

The most likely explanation is the coins never existed.

But they did exist when the bank had Garda pick them up.

If you lost the primary key to a database row, how would you find the data? You’d have to iterate over every piece of data you have. For a physical operation this can be as good as permanently lost.

I was wondering if they’re perhaps talking about gold coins?

If it's not possible, it could just be plain old fraud.

You drive it out in an armored car!

it seems possible they have some software rounding problem.

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