Aspen Parking Meters Ripped Off For Up to $800,000

If the City of Fort Collins is considering putting in parking meters, they should look to the Town of Aspen's problems first.

According to the Associated Press, parking meters in Aspen were stiffed by a sum of up to $800,000 by people who figured out that the credit/debit card friendly machines couldn't tell when a card was maxed out.

Regular parkers in Aspen seemed to realize that if they bought a simple prepaid debit card, they could anonymously rip off the machines. Pretty simple scam. Buy a prepaid card for $20. Have lunch on the card. Then when it's past it's limit, use it for the parking meters without any information attached to it.

Police have compiled a list of debit cards that registered the most transactions from September 2013 to November 2014. More than 170 cards posted amounts greater than $1,000.

This is the kind of 'locals' scam that can spread quickly by word of mouth. It obviously did, because of the massive amount of money racked up in small parking increments.

Maybe the people participating in may not have felt like they were stealing because of the small amount of money at stake each time the scam was perpetrated. The police don't consider it a small matter and are looking into how they can get to the bottom of it.

The Aspen Times reported that the town of Aspen recently replaced all of their parking meters at the cost of $600,000. With the City of Fort Collins investigating paid parking for Old Town, they can learn from the financial shortfall Aspen will be facing because they didn't realize the machines they installed couldn't detect whether a card was maxed out or not.