“ATM Jackpotting” Exposed – It’s Not Just The Fed That Spits Out Free Money

While the central banks of the world have yet to directly unleash the helicopter drop of free money to the end-consumer, preferring instead to seek financial asset inflation (and all its unintended consequences), it appears there is another way to get ‘free money’ direct to the average Joe… “ATM Jackpotting.”According to Wired, using a special button sequence and some insider knowledge, it is possible to reconfigure ATMs to believe they are dispensing one dollar bills, instead of the twenties actually loaded into the cash trays. Though industry sources claim this to be rare, they note that “independent operators and financial institutions are very tight lipped about this sort of thing.”
As Wired reports, “Two Dudes Prove How Easy It Is to Hack ATMs for Free Cash”
When a small-time Tennessee restaurateur named Khaled Abdel Fattah was running short of cash he went to an ATM machine. Actually, according to federal prosecutors, he went to a lot of them. Over 18 months, he visited a slew of small kiosk ATMs around Nashville and withdrew a total of more than $400,000 in 20-dollar bills. The only problem: It wasn’t his money.
Now Fattah and an associate named Chris Folad are facing 30 counts of computer fraud and conspiracy, after a Secret Service investigation uncovered evidence that the men had essentially robbed the cash machines using nothing more than the keypad. Using a special button sequence and some insider knowledge, they allegedly reconfigured the ATMs to believe they were dispensing one dollar bills, instead of the twenties actually loaded into the cash trays, according to a federal indictment issued in the case late last month. A withdrawal of $20 thus caused the machine to spit out $400 in cash, for a profit of a $380.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 11/16/2014.