Star Tech Journal

tion, because although I have no bill
changers on my route, I cannot bear the
thought of fellow operators suffering losses
at $2350 worth of change in a big changer to
some con artist with a gimmick like this.
cautions and confer with your manufactur-
ers service managers to determine under
what, if any, defect conditions such a failure
could occur.
FROM: James Beck
Even if this is a hoax, I would think that for
you, like for me, I would rather duck when a
gun is pointed in my direction regardless of
the condition of its load. In the event that
this actually works on any machines out
there, even one, we are all ahead.
The other possibillty exists that such a
changer can develop a circuit defect which •
could allow such conditional passing of
~urrency. In my own personal experience,
an Ardac series 4001 MBA (game) developed
its own defect and was immediately replaced
Red Label advance replacement under war-
ranty at no charge to me. It was a pleasure
to have an Ardac service manager on the
other end of the phone in July 1987 standing
behind his product 100%. Its defect was not
related to this emergency alert, but was just
as deadly: accept, give credits, escrow the
bill for 60 seconds, and reject the bill to the
player.
It would be an excellent policy for anyone in
touch with this emergency alert to determine
not its origin but its impact on your busi-
ness. There are further considerations in a
case which may be addressed by the Secret
Service who watches over pounded nickels
and counterfeit currency and slugs, but I do
not believe that they can back us up on this
~type of defect.
I would hope that those of you with valida-
tors on bill acceptors, credit pokers, cranes,
or wherever take any and all necessary pre-
I took the time to examine the inner work-
ings of the acceptor heads I had available
and some paperwork on some others. My
conclusion is that this .. trick" won't work on
any of the changers that use mag, photo-
sensors and bill clear switches that are
mounted in the path of the center of the bill.
This means it can't be done on a Rowe or
Ardac $1 & $5 changer, but one suspect did
come to light and I'll need someone who
owns one to try it out. It would be the
National changer. They use a transport clear
switch on the side of the bill the notch is tom
in. That means if the bill passes the opto and
mag tests and is being sent to the stacker,
the notch releases the transport clear switch
which causes the machine to vend. Then the
other side of the notch hits the switch again
to close it and the system assumes another
bill was inserted following the first. It then
could reverse the transport to get rid of the
.. second"bill (i.e. the only bill) giving back the
little turd his /her money along with some of
"ours".
I'm not saying that it definitely is workable
on a national, but it is the only one I can
think of that it might work on.