Bank Customer Deposits Cocaine Through ATM
We’ve heard of cocaine withdrawal, but this is the first time we’ve heard of anyone using the drug to make a deposit.
It seems that some unknown Floridian may have been a smidge ripped out of his mind a couple of weekends ago while attempting to conduct some business at an ATM located in Bradenton. That’s because, according to the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office, a service technician for the Suncoast Credit Union recently discovered a bag of cocaine lodged inside the machine’s “deposit mechanism,” while trying to figure out what caused it to go on the fritz.
Apparently, customers were complaining that the ATM outside the credit union was not functioning properly, so the branch manager put in a call to a technician—referred to in the police report only as Mr. Taudte—to diagnose the problem and get the machine back in service.
During the troubleshooting process, Mr. Taudte was shocked to learn that the culprit jamming up the machine was a small bag containing a “white powdery substance.”
When police arrived on the scene, the powder was immediately shipped off to a crime lab, where it was later confirmed to be cocaine. A team of investigators then began to contemplate the mindset of the type of person who could mistakenly deposit cocaine through an ATM instead of cash.
There is speculation, mostly by us, that officers then began to shuffle through a plethora of terrifying circumstances to try and profile a person with such a savage addiction to drugs that he or she didn’t know they were putting their stash in the bank.
The service technician explained to police that the incident was more likely brought on by a bad luck accident.
“The substance was possibly with the cash of the last person who made the deposit causing the malfunction,” Mr. Taudte said in the police report obtained by the Smoking Gun.
But now the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office has unleashed the hounds and is combing the streets of Bradenton in hopes of tracking down the person responsible for the coke deposit. The police report shows that investigators “obtained the name on the bank account of the last deposit made just before the ATM was placed out of service.”
They fully intend to go after the fiend in hopes of prosecuting them to the fullest extent of the law.
Fortunately, investigators have yet to charge anyone for this supposed crime. The Dayton Daily News reports that investigators have had difficulties building a case because they cannot prove the person who last used the machine was responsible for the cocaine.
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