[HN Gopher] GardaWorld lost track of millions
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GardaWorld lost track of millions
Author : danso
Score : 97 points
Date : 2020-10-18 16:06 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (projects.tampabay.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (projects.tampabay.com)
| gruez wrote:
| Not related to the article contents, but the font rendering on
| the document exhibits are really bad. Here's how it looks on
| firefox: https://i.imgur.com/z7xbUN4.png. I suspect It's because
| there's a slight rotation which screws up the font rendering.
| It's slightly better on chrome but it's still there. Anyone else
| getting this?
| ziml77 wrote:
| Looks good for me in Firefox on macOS.
| https://i.imgur.com/s8wLsBZ.png
| shawnz wrote:
| Wow, that does look at lot better. Slightly rotated text has
| always been janky looking on Windows for me, regardless of
| the app.
|
| EDIT: I think it's just the high DPI which fixes the issue.
| When I zoom in so that the text is bigger that also makes it
| look better.
| willcipriano wrote:
| > 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?
| HenryBemis wrote:
| 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.
| foobiekr wrote:
| The most likely explanation is the coins never existed.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| If it's not possible, it could just be plain old fraud.
| gruez wrote:
| 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.
| willcipriano wrote:
| 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?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > especially if you have accomplices
|
| Or if you're one of several people all independently stealing
| quarters.
| ponker wrote:
| 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.
| williamscales wrote:
| I was wondering if they're perhaps talking about gold coins?
| londons_explore wrote:
| How large were the losses when compared to the fees charged by
| GardaWorld for cash management?
|
| Every business needs to make a tradeoff of how much money is
| spent on security vs how much theft occurs... And it might be
| that GardaWorld has made the right tradeoff here, and all they
| need to do is pay to replace the lost coins.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| The article states an annual revenue of $2.7b, and a shortage
| of about $9m.
|
| That seems well within the realm of "they can cover it"... but
| the real problem isn't the shortage but the practices that lead
| to it in the first place. I don't see the shocking part of this
| story as "Garda has a shortage of $9m," but "Garda has had a
| shortage of what they report to be $9m, and there is strong
| evidence that they have defrauded auditors to conceal their
| poor controls for an indefinite period."
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > In June, Garda reported paying him a $2 million bonus in
| acknowledgement of how well he ran the company.
|
| Uh, so they were afraid of a million dollar shortage in a vault,
| but had enough profits to pay bonuses to C-level execs?
| [deleted]
| csours wrote:
| >"The lawsuit said that Cretier, Garda's founder and chief
| executive officer, told a meeting full of executives that he ran
| one of the world's largest investigative operations and if anyone
| leaked how bad the company's finances were, he'd find out.
| According to the lawsuit, he added: "I will kill you, and I will
| kill your family."
|
| In a deposition, Cretier admitted he threatened to kill any
| executives who leaked information. But he testified that he was
| joking and denied threatening to kill family members."
|
| Holy shit. Things that are not appropriate for managers to joke
| about: Protected class, firing people, killing people.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| I have no way of knowing whether or not he was really joking
| (and obviously it's not okay to joke about that), but why would
| you trust him that he was joking? He hardly seems like a
| trustworthy guy.
| csours wrote:
| I guess my tone and mentality were not apparent from my
| comment, because holy shit yes that's the problem.
| gumby wrote:
| I think this kind of "technical debt" is penny-wise-but-pound-
| foolish but I can see where it fits in their scheme of things.
|
| It seems that one reason for management not to be worried is that
| the sums are so small. Upgrading security in all their facilities
| would probably cost $9MM which they could easily cover from
| operating cash (they had about USD 3B) last year.
|
| If I were a bank though I'd be concerned that this was merely the
| visible top of a large iceberg of problems.
| techdevangelist wrote:
| Yes, stalling auditors and engaging in a coverup to hide
| information from auditors tends to draw some harsh findings.
| It's 9M that's known to be missing, it could be much larger (or
| smaller). But generally deceiving your customers isn't the best
| way to keep them coming back.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The customers are part of the grift.
|
| I have a friend who used to run cash operations for a midsize
| bank. When they outsourced the operation, she basically laid
| out her idea where the money savings came from, which boiled
| down to eliminating internal controls necessary to operate...
| if you're a bank. Compartmentalized physical security
| operations don't scale up quickly.
|
| End of the day, it's the usual story of corporate
| incompetence and regulators looking the other way. At the end
| of the day, FDIC is insuring all of this bullshit.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Assuming that the amount they "lost" can be covered with a
| couple of months' profits. What thet just did, is forced
| every bank they work with to enforce their "right to audit".
| I believe that on the next contract updates, EVERY client,
| will make sure for the two following things:
|
| 1) right to audit (in case they don't already have one), and
|
| 2) 4h notice (or something equally small/ridiculous. The 4h
| is a minimum in order to ensure that names/passport numbers,
| photos, etc are exchanged to ensure security.
|
| EDIT: extra point:
|
| 3) I believe (since in the banking internal audits everyone
| knows everyone else)(especially on the Director/CAE level),
| some banks will _ahen_ coordinate their audits and give them
| a group visit.. I want to see GW showcasing the same bag of
| coins to 10 clients at the same hour..
| llacb47 wrote:
| Part one of the Tampa Bay Times' investigation:
| https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/g...
| bigbubba wrote:
| Vaults without cameras is beyond incompetence. I hope the
| investigators are open to the possibility that these vaults were
| set up to fail by management.
| metiscus wrote:
| Vault-Tec wants to know your location
| rbanffy wrote:
| 9 millions, when you think about banks, seems like a rounding
| error.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| But when you think about all the access controls and chain of
| custody etc in the banks, it seems next to impossible.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Except they were regularly defrauding auditors and covering it
| all up. It seems possible, if not likely, that we're seeing the
| tip of the iceberg here. Possible on the amount of missing
| cash, but also possibly in the rest of accounting practices. A
| company that will move around cash to fool auditors likely
| doesn't have any qualms about cooking its books to fool
| investors.
| rbanffy wrote:
| That part is horrifying. The incompetence levels required
| suggest it's deliberate.
| cryptica wrote:
| > The company also stores money for the Federal Reserve
|
| I'm hearing way too much news about the Federal Reserve Bank
| recently. Why does absolutely everything seem to be somehow
| related to the Fed these days?
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(page generated 2020-10-18 23:00 UTC)