A DRINKS vendor in Cologne, Germany, was recently tried and convicted to 10 months in prison for modifying a bottle recycling machine and swindling several tens of thousands of euros from the national recycling system.

    Bottle-recycling machines in Germany are fairly straightforward — a person inserts one or more bottles into the machine and they receive a receipt for a few euro-cents, or euros, depending on the number of bottles recycled.

    But in a case presented in front of a Cologne court last week, one recycling machine ended up paying a whopping 44,362.75 euros (US$47,000) without recycling a single bottle.

    It turns out that an unnamed local drinks vendor managed to modify one such recycling machine located in the basement of his shop so that he could earn a lot more than the usual spare change.

    Evidence presented during the trial showed that the 37-year-old defendant had installed a magnet sensor and a kind of wooden tunnel into the machine, which allowed him to insert the bottle into the mechanism, receive his receipt and then retrieve the bottle without it actually getting shredded inside.

    If you’re wondering how many times the man had to insert and retrieve that one bottle to earn a total of US$47,000, the exact number is 177,451 times. The judge presiding over this case called the scam a “logistical master stroke,” adding that he must have “done nothing else every day other than attend to the machine.” And while it is unknown exactly how long it took the drinks vendor to repeat the process 177,451, he did have this to say on the matter: “I had a radio next to it because otherwise it was really boring.”

    The defendant revealed that he had invested around 5,000 euros in modifying the machine.

    (SD-Agencies)