Explosive ATMs: the impotence of banks and the police

reOfficials at the State Criminal Police Office in Düsseldorf have accurately listed every ATM explosion in North Rhine-Westphalia. Consequently, it started this year on January 6 with a device from Sparkasse Wuppertal, and the next day it arrived at Commerzbank in Warburg and Sparkasse Remscheid.

The last names on the list until mid-December were Deutsche Bank in Bad Salzuflen (December 11), as well as Volksbanken in Troisdorf (December 12) and Nettersheim (December 15). A total of 174 explosions ago, in all of last year there were 69 less.

The new record in the most populous federal state has contributed significantly to the fact that more vending machines were recorded in Germany than ever before. This was the result of a poll conducted by WELT AM SONNTAG. As of December 16, the state criminal investigation offices of the federal states reported 390 explosions.

Perpetrators follow a typical pattern

This means that the previous record from 2018 was broken before Christmas, when an ATM was blown up 369 times in Germany according to the Federal Criminal Police Office; in 2019 there were 349 machines. The Saxon State Criminal Police Office was the only one that did not provide any precise information, only talking about explosions in the “single digit range”.

Banks and police have been watching organized robberies helplessly for years. Despite individual successes in investigations, the incentive to act remains great. If you manage to open the way to the cash cassettes in the machine, you can win up to 100,000 euros. State criminal investigation bureaus hardly know what else to do but vehemently demand the closure of ATMs.

There is a typical pattern: criminals come at night, fill the ATM with gas, turn on the mix, and disappear with the cash. Sometimes homemade pyrotechnics and even commercial explosives are used. Experienced gangs hardly need more than three minutes for this. The highly motorized getaway car takes you to the next arterial road.

However, not all the explosions were successful this year. 230 times something went wrong, 160 times the perpetrators achieved their goal. The “success rate” was 41 percent, as in the previous year.

There is no shortage of opportunities. There are about 60,000 ATMs across the country. The Germans’ love of cash must finally be satisfied. Furthermore, banks neglect the protection of their machines, as claimed by the criminal police.

Unlike the Netherlands, for example, there is no regulation to secure cassettes with cash with color cartridges, adhesive technology, gas sensors, high-resolution cameras and specially reinforced security walls, and even if this happens, protection is often insufficient.

According to the State Criminal Police Office of Rhineland-Palatinate, the security technology used in individual cases is often based only on the minimum requirements of the insurance industry to obtain compensation for damage to buildings and bills stolen due to lack of legal requirements.

The pandemic brought gangs to Germany even further.

Not only are the gang’s work patterns well known, but their origins as well. According to the Lower Saxony State Criminal Police Office, most of the demolitions are carried out by Dutch-Moroccan perpetrators from the Amsterdam and Utrecht area.

The corona pandemic has apparently driven them even further to Germany. Because when the borders between the Netherlands and Belgium and France were closed in the meantime, from the point of view of the researchers in Hannover, the only way forward was to Germany.

The situation on the border with Eastern Europe looked different, according to investigators, the perpetrators also come from there. The borders with Poland and the Czech Republic were temporarily closed. Statistics barely show explosions in Brandenburg and Berlin.

If the police have their way, the financial sector not only has to increase protection, but also reduce the number of machines. The large number of installation sites and service points made “significantly more difficult preventive and repressive tactical measures,” explains the Hessian State Criminal Police Office.

Colleagues in Lower Saxony are calling for the “opportunities and incentives to act” to be fundamentally reduced. This could include reducing the number of ATMs installed by financial institutions. Other suggestions are: stop filling the machines and expand cashless payment transactions, that is, pay by plastic card and mobile phone.

What is supposed to ruin the gang business would make everyday life very difficult for people who depend on cash. The way to the next ATM is longer and the cash cassettes would be empty more often if they were not so full.

Individual banks have long since downsized their machine network. Commerzbank announced that the number of ATMs had dropped by around 200 from 2019 to 2,200 now. The reason is not the explosion of the machine, but the merger of the company’s branches.

Another bank admits behind closed doors that the high number of demolitions contributed to installing fewer machines. The numerous explosions in the border regions made ATMs very expensive.

Officially, the financial sector continues to say that it wants to invest more in security. “The main objective of every bank or savings bank remains to recognize and prevent the act as soon as possible,” the main industry association, the German credit industry, said on request.

The investments required by the banking industry are considerable. Each credit institution performs a location-related risk analysis and then makes its own decisions on organizational and security measures. Risks must be minimized, especially in the case of blasting, the focus is on personal protection, according to the association. It doesn’t look like the perpetrators are going to have supply problems any time soon.