Phoenix – Forget 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 didn’t discourage thieves over the summer in such states as Arizona, California and Georgia.
“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.
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.”
