Two eagle-eyed SkyCity security guards have been credited with helping foil an alleged ATM card-skimming operation in Auckland.

The Police Financial Crime Unit told staff at the casino a week ago to be on the lookout for the Canadian man and woman.

Two guards noticed the pair and raised the alarm with police, who arrested them on Wednesday night.

The pair had allegedly obtained close to $200,000 from the skimming operation and had made attempts to obtain around $160,000 more, Auckland City Police said.

The two foreign nationals were now facing a number of forgery-related charges and would be appearing in Auckland District Court.

Like so many classic Western anti-heroes before him, he rolled (literally) into town with a singular goal in mind: cleaning up the streets, which had become a gritty hotbed of harassment, vandalism, break-ins and grift.

The only difference was that he was a slow-moving, 180kg robot with a penchant for snapping hundreds of photos a minute without people’s permission, and this was San Francisco’s Mission District in 2017.

What could go wrong? Quite a bit, as it turns out.

In the past month, his first on the job, “K-9” — a 1.5m-tall, 1m-wide K5 Autonomous Data Machine that can be rented for US$6 an hour from Silicon Valley startup Knightscope — was battered with barbecue sauce, allegedly smeared with feces, covered by a tarp and nearly toppled by an attacker.

As if those incidents weren’t bad enough, K-9 was also accused of …..

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Over the past few months the number of calls received from the general Public and from Members of the Association in relation to so-called “Locksmiths Scammers” have increased dramatically.

Both A Current Affair in Australia and FairGo in New Zealand have covered this issue on National television in an effort to inform the public. International local news programs (US) and security related groups on Facebook (UK) are also publishing information around this issue.

Due to existing regulations in Australia and New Zealand, and the different approaches by the various authorities in both countries, the MLAA is limited to reporting the action by scammers to these relevant authorities (SLED, the ATO, the Office of Fair Trading, etc).

In an effort to better educate the public, and to make more people in Australia and New Zealand aware of such scam activities, the MLAA has developed the “Beware of Locksmiths Scammers” campaign.

This campaign….

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