Robbers Steal ATM Machines!
This isn’t actually that dumb. What a great way to steal money…steal the bank machine! Don’t try this at home!
Leave the gun. Bank robbers have found an easier way to make off with other people’s money: Around the country, thieves have hot-wired forklifts at construction sites, chugged up to banks and scooped up their ATMs, with all the cash inside.
ATM manufacturers have been working on ways to stop the heists, and sometimes the money involved is so small it hardly seems worth the risk. But that has not discouraged thieves this summer in such states as Arizona, California and Georgia.
They have pulled off or attempted such thefts at least 21 times this year in the Phoenix area alone.
"It’s called the smash-and-dash," said Rob Evans, director of industry marketing for Dayton, Ohio-based NCR Corp., the world’s largest maker of automated teller machines. Evans is the company expert on ATM thefts.
Since the 1990s, thieves have used forklifts to steal cash machines in Indonesia, New Zealand, Scotland, Ireland and Estonia, as well as the U.S. Four years ago, criminals plowed through the front doors of a movie theater in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, with a forklift, drove into the lobby, hoisted the bulky machine and carried it to a waiting pickup truck.
The payoff for those who succeed in breaking into the machines varies widely, from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.
"The vast majority of those attacks are unsuccessful," Evans said. "A lot of times you just get a lot of damage."
Some attempts end in almost comic failure. Often, ATM thieves are spotted by security guards and surveillance cameras as soon as they come rumbling up, and they are eventually caught. Others flee after failing to pry the machines loose. Some get away with the machines, only to find the concrete-and-steel vault tough to crack.
In the Phoenix area, police will not say how much has been stolen. The city is in a booming region with plenty of construction projects and lots of drive-through banks with open-air ATMs bolted to the ground, instead of embedded in a brick wall.
One of the most recent cases took place Monday at a bank in Mesa. Sheriff’s deputies found the machine later that night burned in the desert. The cash was gone.
Law enforcement agencies in the metropolitan area have formed a task force with banking industry officials to investigate the thefts. Via CNN
Tags: atm, robbing, bank robbers
1 Comment
I was DYING when I heard this on the radio! Being in the atm business myself, I couldnt help but look at some of my machines and laugh!