Fairfax Bus Fare Boxes Emptied of Cash

Police Say $326,000 Taken at Herndon Depot After Security System Is Breached

Fares for the Fairfax Connector bus come in $1 at a time, and that's how they left, police said.

There was an elaborate system to thwart bus-fare bandits. Somehow, police said, a night-shift worker found a way to open the fare boxes and make off with plastic bags full of $1 bills.

A lot of $1 bills.

Fairfax County officials said $200,000 to $300,000 was taken from Fairfax Connector cash boxes in the thefts, which started last year. Fairfax police put the total at $326,000.

Thong Khoune Sisaath of Sterling, who cleaned and fueled buses at the Herndon depot and handled cash boxes, was arrested July 2 and charged with grand larceny and possession of burglary tools in the case, according to police and court documents. A Fairfax man was also arrested. An investigation is continuing, police said.

The cash boxes on Fairfax Connector's 197 buses have electronic safeguards. The boxes are scanned before they are removed to provide a record of how much money the boxes hold. The locked boxes are placed in a vault, where the cash is put into containers.

The containers are closed by a self-sealing mechanism and are collected the next day by an armored-car service, said Rollo Axton, Fairfax's chief of transit services.

Police said Sisaath found a way around the security measures.

"Anytime you get the human factor and greed, you have the possibility of somebody trying to steal," said Kathy Ichter, director of the Fairfax County Department of Transportation.

Police said Sisaath would bypass the usual area where cash boxes were scanned and emptied. Instead, she would take the buses to another area at the Herndon depot and use a key to unlock the cash boxes. She would fill the bags with the money and drop the bags, along with the contents of her pockets, into her car, police said.

"As she did this she looked around in a suspicious manner attempting to insure she was not observed," according to court documents.

Fairfax officials said the county did not lose money because of a contract provision with the private firm that runs the buses guaranteeing that the county receives the amount recorded when the cash boxes are scanned.

"The county will not end up absorbing any of the losses on this," said Mike Setzer, vice president of Veolia Transportation in Oak Brook, Ill.

Fairfax transportation officials first noticed a problem last fall. The scanned totals from the cash boxes stopped matching the totals on the bank deposits. According to industry standards, the two figures should be within 1 percent of each other, Axton said.

"We were getting anywhere from 20 to 30 percent on some days, and that obviously raised the red flag," Axton said.

The installation of SmarTrip card readers, which allow cash-less travel, throughout the Fairfax Connector system starting last year made it hard to tell if the discrepancy was a problem with the new technology or a sign of theft, officials said.

Audits were begun. On nights when supervisors were present, the cash discrepancy disappeared. When supervisors were not at the depot, money was missing, officials said.

Many questions remain, Setzer said, among them: "who got the key and how they got the key and how the system allowed that to happen."

A Veolia employee also was arrested in connection with the thefts, according to court documents and police. Carl Rich of Fairfax was arrested July 3 and charged with embezzlement, possession of burglary tools, and conspiracy to commit grand larceny.

Setzer said he did not have information on Rich's status.

"Some of the people who are involved in this are relatively low-ranking people who shouldn't have had access to any kind of key, so we're still a little puzzled as to how that happened," Setzer said. "Someone else had to help them get access to the key, whether that's our person or someone else."

Sisaath worked for a subcontractor, Aramark, which provides staffing for prisons, jails, airports and other sensitive jobs. Sisaath no longer works for the firm, company spokeswoman Sarah Jarvis said.

"The behavior you've described is unacceptable and is not tolerated by this company," Jarvis said.