Paris Eiffel Tower Fraud!

For many years you didn’t need to be a professional hacker to break into the cash register of the Eiffel tower. For the pay-desk staff of one of the worlds most visited monuments it was a question of simply turning the printer on and off - and the sale of the entry ticket was no longer registered.

A family with three children, who rented an apartment in Paris for a weekend to visit the 118th year old tower, handed over 50 euro which in turn disappeared into the pocket of one of the members of the pay-desk staff.

Ginette, Josette, Marguerite, Edith, Eloïsa and ten other pay-desk employees, for most part neat ladies of a certain age, sold this way between 1996 and 2002 a suspected 112,000 illegal tickets.

The turnover of almost one million euro became a supplement above their monthly salary.

Five years ago they were finally discovered. The operator of the Eiffel tower received an anonymous letter from a previous employee, who revealed the illegal practices.

The Executive Board asked assistance from justice and could examine at which pay-desks fraud was committed.

Initially the pay-desk staff confessed but later they reversed their statement into saying that they were not guilty. The justice department was not too impressed. How could it be possible that some of the staff member’s didn’t withdrawal any money from their bank account for years? And where did the high amounts came from they deposited from time to time into their bank account? Were that really “tips”, as they said it were? Moreover, the staff members thought guilty of fraud sold considerably less tickets than their colleagues.

The judge condemned about fifteen of them last week because of the fraud. They received conditional prison sentences of up to three months and fines up to twenty thousand euro.

In addition they must repay the money which they stole between 2000 and 2002 plus interest, summing in total 700,000 euro. For the most fanatical defrauder the amount to be paid back is almost 100.000 euro.

The judge took into account that the condemned have a representative function: the twelve ladies and three lords were considered to leave a good impression of France to the many thousands of tourists who visit the Eiffel tower each year.

The construction of Gustav Eiffel gets almost seven millions visits annually.

Initially the tower would have been demolished twenty years after construction (build for the World Exhibition), but the then highest construction the world survived, proved to be a handy communication tower and became eventually the most important and most known symbol of France.