Dunkin Donuts Ensnared in Prostitution, ATM Hacking
Dunkin Donuts may finally have found the edge it needs to cripple Starbucks and Krispy Kreme: Prostitutes. And also ATM hacking. Just the thing to pump up that stock!
A Dunkin Donuts employee in Rockaway, N.J. was charged by police with "providing sexual services in exchange for money" while working her shifts. "She was a night time employee (working 9 p.m. to 5 a.m.), supposedly a very good one," Detective Sgt. Kyle Schwarzmann tells the Asbury Park Press, possibly making a joke (?). A sting operation finally took down her horrible single-person prostitution ring:
"[A police officer] went in plain clothes through the drive thru window," Schwarzmann said. "He spoke to her and she said if he wanted a good time to call her and she gave him her phone number."
Haigh parked in the parking lot and Redmond allegedly came out, approached him and gave him a specifc price list for her services.
Haigh returned on another occasion and inquired about her services, was offered a new, and lower, price so he said he needed to go to a bank machine but would return with the money.
(The economy! What can you say!) Meanwhile, in New York City, two Romanian men were arrested and charged with ATM fraud—apparently they'd used Dunkin Donuts gift cards, and stolen bank account information, to steal $17,000 from a Chase in Hollis, Queens:
Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney, said the two men, visitors from Romania traveling in the United States on journalism visas, used the bank's ATMs "as their personal slot machines" - carrying out unauthorized transactions by encoding rechargeable Dunkin' Donuts cards with account information belonging to customers at various area banks.
[...]
At the time of the arrest, the authorities said, the men were found with $17,703 in stolen cash and 66 Dunkin' Donuts gift cards.
The men had apparently changed the 16-digit "vendor account number" on the gift cards to account numbers from a variety of local banks. "America runs on Dunkin"? More like "Romania runs on re-encoded Dunkin gift cards"! (Seriously, though, there is apparently a "global" Romanian ATM fraud network.)
