A thief who posed as an employee of a coin-cashing company sent to tend to the machines, only to break into them and take the coin vaults with him, was sentenced Thursday to four years in prison. The US attorney's office for Oregon said Richard Pena repeated the scam dozens of times in 2021, stealing a total of hundreds of thousands of dollars in coins, NBC News reports, while driving a van from Las Vegas to Portland. His run ended that December when a suspicious store employee called police, prosecutors said. Officials said Pena's toll, in stolen coins and damage to machines, came to $715,000.
The day before he was arrested, prosecutors in Portland said, Pena took about $10,000 from a store in Hillsboro, Oregon, then almost $7,000 from another store in town. Less than an hour after that, the Las Vegas man pocketed almost $3,000 from a store in Beaverton and another $3,000 from a second store in the same city, per KGW. Sheriff's deputies who searched his rental van, U-Haul truck, and hotel room said they found 1.5 million coins totaling more than $133,000 in laundry baskets and bags, court documents say. "This was not pocket change," prosecutors wrote. Pena took a plea deal on a conspiracy charge. His sentence calls for $581,858 in restitution. (Thieves took 2 million dimes from the Philadelphia Mint in April.)