ATM repairman takes cash out and fills the ATM with fake money

A scheme that sounds more like a heist film plot than an actual crime ended this month with the arrest of Samuel Kioskli, a 64-year-old San Francisco man who robbed some $200,000 from the very ATMs he was paid to service — and replaced the real cash with counterfeit bills he had made on a photocopier.

Kioskli was an employee of Diebold, which services ATMs for Bank of America. Prosecutors say that on July 4 of last year he visited six bank branches in San Francisco and one in Daly City, removed genuine currency from the machines' trays, and slipped in photocopied $20 bills in its place. The San Mateo County district attorney described the counterfeits as unsophisticated — bills simply run through a copier, cut up, and loaded into the machines.

What makes the case remarkable is how long it took to unravel. Nearly ten months passed before Kioskli was arrested on May 11 during a routine traffic stop in Phoenix. He had fled California and, in a twist worthy of the movies, had been reported as a missing person by his own wife — which is what put his name in front of investigators when the traffic stop flagged him in the system.

The case illustrates a category of fraud that relies on trusted access rather than technical sophistication. Kioskli didn't need to hack the machines or defeat their security systems. He was authorized to open them. What he exploited was the gap between physical access and the verification systems designed around it — the machine's internal count showed the right denominations present, so nothing tripped an alarm.

For financial institutions, it is a reminder that insider fraud — committed by authorized personnel — is often harder to detect than external attacks. Dual-control requirements for cash handling, background checks, and reconciliation that verifies note quality rather than just quantity are among the countermeasures the industry keeps rediscovering the need for, roughly one photocopied $20 at a time.