Cashier of Fondation Beyeler robs the museum with deceptive checkout tricks

A twelve-year museum heist where every little bit counts. This is how you can describe the deception for which the treasurer of the Fondation Beyeler, the famous museum of modern and contemporary art near Basel, was sentenced to three years and seven months in prison by a Swiss court last Friday.

The 54-year-old robbed the museum with a series of scams of 986,126 Swiss francs, more than a million euros. She did this as a ticket salesman from 2008 to 2019, when she was caught and fired.

the Basler Zeitung He reported on the trial, quoting the judge, who said to the former cashier as he read the verdict: “You probably would have gone on like this if you hadn’t been caught.” In addition to the prison sentence, the woman was fined and must return to the museum what she stole. It is unclear to what extent women can do this.

The woman sometimes sells emergency tickets to visitors, which are on hand in the museum should the cash register system fail, and pockets the cash. She also sold tickets (for €26) twice: once the real ticket, then the receipt under the guise that the printer had failed her.

Her most daring ploy was to win back tickets sold by her teammates and pocket the refunds. Because of this last trick, the woman eventually runs to the lamp. A colleague noticed that there were a lot of canceled tickets she had signed.

The fraud evokes memories of falsifying museum annual tickets at De Stadshof in Zwolle in the 1990s. Knowing the director, the attendees ran 36 self-purchased museum annual tickets through the scanner almost every day. Thus the Museum of Naive and Exotic Art received 100,000 guilders.