Las Vegas Man Sentenced to 4 Years for I-70 Coinstar Heist

Richard Pena didn’t just steal coins; he stole time, patience, and the quiet confidence of business owners who assumed their Coinstar kiosks were secure because the lock was simple.

He wasn’t breaking in. He was slipping in.

The Las Vegas native drove up Interstate 70, a ghost in a red neck gaiter and gloves, opening doors that had never been forced. He took more than $67,500 from eleven machines across Colorado in just four days in November 2021. It wasn’t a random grab-bag of loose change. It was a calculated heist, executed with the precision of a man who knew exactly how much a roll of quarters was worth and exactly how long it took to haul it out.

And now, he’s paying for it.

Pena was sentenced to four years in the Colorado Department of Corrections, a relatively short stay for a spree that stretched from Grand Junction to Thornton. But the money trail tells a different story. He was ordered to pay over $77,000 in restitution to Coinstar for the Colorado haul alone. That number is a fraction of the total damage. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Oregon, where Pena was already serving a federal sentence for similar thefts, noted he owed around $582,000 in restitution there.

“This case wasn’t pocket change — it was real loss for businesses and communities along the I-70 corridor,” Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a news release. “Through hard investigative work, prosecutors in the Special Prosecutions Unit were able to bring justice for this 2021 coin-cashing kiosk heist that stretched from Grand Junction to Thornton.”

The key detail? The key was universal.

According to the grand jury indictment, all Coinstar kiosks in the United States were keyed identically at the time. One key opened every machine in the country. Pena used that single key to access eleven different locations in Mesa, Eagle, Adams, Jefferson, and Denver counties. No forced entry. No broken glass. Just a twist of the wrist and a roll of coins into a dolly.

The spree started in Clifton. Security footage showed Pena, wearing a dark beanie and a red neck gaiter pulled high, opening the kiosk at City Market on 569 32 Road. He posed as an employee, a trick that worked because the machines didn’t know the difference between staff and thief. Later that same day, he hit the City Market in Grand Junction at 630 24 Road.

Investigators connected the dots by looking south. The thefts matched similar ones in Southern California and other Western states. The pattern was too consistent, too methodical. Police tracked him back to his home in Las Vegas, then followed his trail up the I-70 corridor.

Deputies in Clark County, Washington, searched his rented cars and a hotel room. They found the tools of the trade: clothing for disguise, keys, and laundry baskets filled with millions of coins. The stolen currency sat in a hotel room, a mountain of copper and nickel waiting to be counted.

Pena pleaded guilty to eleven charges of third-degree burglary. But the justice here is complicated. Before his Colorado sentencing, he was already serving a federal sentence in Oregon for similar thefts, having been given 48 months in federal prison and three years of supervised release in June 2023. The Oregon case involved a ruse he repeated dozens of times, driving from Las Vegas to a grocery store in Vancouver, Washington, where an alert employee spotted him and called the police.

Coinstar has since upgraded its kiosks to two-factor authentication, closing the simple keyhole that Pena exploited. But for the businesses along the I-70 corridor, the loss was immediate. The $77,000 restitution order is a start, but it’s a long way from the half-million dollars he owed in Oregon.

Stand there long enough and you can still see the kiosk in the City Market parking lot in Clifton. It’s just a metal box now, humming quietly. But for four days in November 2021, it was an empty vault.