There are countless techniques and tactics adopted by bank robbers as a means of carting away with your valuables and ultimately escaping justice. Within the short while, you will be reading different means that robbers have employed at a point or the other to rob their victims and I can assure you that you would be amazed at some of them.
Let’s start with the case study of Carl Gugasian, who according to J. Carthy, took robbery to the next level.
He purposely turned himself into a skilled bank robber through military training up to special forces and tactical weapons standard and studying a Masters in systems analysis followed by doctoral work in statistics and probability. This meticulous approach led him to run statistical analysis on the best time to commit robberies. He worked out just before closing on a Friday was the best time as it maximized the potential take but kept potential bystanders to a minimum. He used the same forensic approach in picking banks which were close to freeways yet sufficiently isolated from urban areas.
When inside the bank he would vault the counter from a standing job wearing a horror mask and brandishing a gun and make his escape via a motor bike to a hidden van. He successfully robbed banks for thirty years and stole over $2 million (Carthy, 2018).
The above is no doubt a very long and patient tactic that people who wish to take robbery as a career will undergo. The fact is that not too many people will ever reason along this line, not even authorities in the field. This is simply weird and unimaginable. Let’s consider some further instances.
Inspiration from Bollywood movies—Chelembra Bank Robbery in Kerala
Chelembra Bank Robbery is considered to be one of the biggest bank heists in Kerala. The robbery took place at Malappuram district of Kerala in December 2007. The robbers got away with 80 kg of gold and about Rs. 50,00,000 in cash, total worth up to Rs. 8 Crores. What’s more interesting is the way in which the robbery was pulled off.
The Heist:
- The bank was on the second floor of a building.
- The perpetrators rented a restaurant on the ground floor of the building. They closed the restaurant and put a sign outside saying that it was “under renovation”. They even bought construction materials to make it look convincing.
- They used the fake restaurant cover to drill up a hole in the ceiling, which allowed them to access the strong room of the bank where the safes were kept.
- They opened the safes using gas cutting tools and took away the goods kept inside.
Eventually, the gang and its leader were arrested in February 2008. The leader confessed to committing the crime and said that their method of the heist was inspired by the Bollywood movie, Dhoom (Rathore, 2015).
Robbery of Societe General Bank
The mastermind behind this operation, Albert Spaggiari was the owner of a photographic studio living in Nice, France. He apparently grew bored of his middle-class life and planned this heist.
The Heist:
- He decided to break in the bank vault by digging underneath from a nearby sewer system.
- Spaggiari then recruited a group of professional gangsters to help him dig the tunnel which took around 2 months to complete.
- On the Bastille Day festival when the bank was closed for a long weekend, the gang broke into the vault and stole over 60 million francs worth of money, securities and other valuables.
- When the robbery was discovered, the following message was found on the vault wall: “sans armes, nimaine, ni violence” which is translated as: “without weapons, nor hatred, nor violence”.
- The police initially had no clue of the heist, but later Spaggiari and his gang were ratted out by a member of their own gang. Spaggiari was caught, but he managed to escape the courthouse.
After that incident, he was never caught and the loot from the heist was never found (Rathore, 2015).
Jack Flanagan in a 2014 article shared how people can rob bank in 21st century. He wrote: “These days, you can’t rob banks with a classic “stick ’em up,” have the teller fill your bag, and escape in your get-away vehicle. It’s just not going to happen. These days biometric technologies (eye/fingerprint scanning and the like), time-locked vaults, silent alarms, exploding dye packs — sometimes concealed within the money itself — will make a hash job of your heist.
“You’re not out of options: Crafty criminals have adapted to new technologies almost as fast as banks have been installing them. Security has moved into a more digital era — yes — but its dangers are that they are now automated and that the people using them barely understand the technology. A criminal with a sound understanding of the fairly common-place technologies used in bank security is already fast on their way to understanding how they break open the bank… or better: ‘Lift’ the ‘joint’.”
He urged them to always go where the money.
He continued: “If you’re happy to get “stuck in” with the bank robbing process, there are quite a few options available. On a relatively small scale, you can use clone debit cards, which can hack a bank from an ATM. For this to be effective, you’d need to disable the ATM’s withdrawal limit, which mean you could withdraw more than the allotted few hundred dollars a day. The key to a good heist is speed: If you’re slow, you get caught. Hackers can disable withdrawal fees online. Alternatively, these intrepid individuals used oxyacetylene welders to bust open ATMs and just took the money. They kept portable acetylene tanks on-hand to perform the task over the course of a night.
“A little more hardcore is the Brazilian bank heist that took place in 2005. A group of men bought a house in central Fortaleza, in the province of Ceará. They put up a sign calling themselves a landscaping company and over the course of three months tunneled beneath the house toward the vault of a Banco Central. They were meticulous — disabling the bank’s alarm system before the grab, and spreading burnt lime around the property to prevent finger prints. The money — 160 million real-dollars ($73.2 million, £45.6 million) — was unmarked, meaning tracing was impossible. Brazil recovered less than R$9 million of that money, and eight of a possible 25 perpetrators” (Flanagan, 2014).
References
Carthy, J (2018). What Was The Best Bank Robbery Strategy Of All Time? Retrieved from https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-best-bank-robbery-strategy-of-all-time
Flanagan, J (2014). How To Rob A Bank In The 21st Century. Retrieved from https://theweek.com/articles/453640/how-rob-bank-21st-century
Rathore, J (2015). 7 Innovative Techniques That Robbers Actually Used In Real Life. Retrieved from https://www.storypick.com/most-epic-robberies/