Toll collectors: not the best students of history! Once again, a young toll collector has been busted allegedly stealing on the job in the exact same way many a toll collector has been caught before: videotape.
In a case that is very similar to the then 19-year-old Throgs Neck collector caught last year, 22-year-old probationary Verrazano collector Richard Betancourt allegedly thought a good scam to pull would be to collect the correct $13 tolls for cars and then only charge the system the $5.50 charged for motorcycles, leaving him with the change. Change that adds up quick. All in all the MTA says he took roughly $7,500 between January and March.
What Betancourt apparently didn't know is that every time a car goes through the tolls the number of axels on a vehicle is automatically recorded, counted and checked against what the collector puts into the system. If those numbers don't match, an audit kicks in. "If you're dumb enough as a toll collector that you do this, when they keep computer records of everything, you deserve to get caught," a source cackled to the Staten Island Advance. "It's beyond stupid, and the guy doesn't even have a full job yet, he's a probationary."
Betancourt was arrested at work earlier this week and charged with fifth-degree grand larceny, 34 counts of first-degree falsifying business records, and a single count of official misconduct. So, if you are a toll collector thinking of using this scam? Maybe try and think of a new one.
