ATM thefts have declined since the ATM’s have been secured more strongly. One way is to use stronger bolts or cables to stronger floors… compartments have been sealed to prevent gas attack (fill ATM with acetylene, ignite… ). There have been lots of news articles where the ATM has refused to budge or open during attempted theft.
Also they have put alarms into the ATM’s to give police a clue that the alarm is really a serious alarm … not merely a false alarm or a door to a toilet being vandalized.
Such upgrades might have only occurred after an ATM theft though… there’s still weak and insecure ATM’s out there.
Having spent a fair bit of time working for a construction company that did a lot of work renovating and building banks, I can say with a fair degree of confidence (at least up here in Canada) that trying to rob a bank is a bad idea. There’s hardly any easily accessible cash and it is spread around the facility, so it would take way too long to get to.
As for ATMs, the ones in Canada are all equipped with GPS as well as a couple other features that would make a clean escape difficult and getting any money out of them well nigh impossible without it being an inside job. And even then, it would be a long, challenging process.
Bottom line, from what I’ve personally seen, is that banks have gotten very good at protecting their cash. You’re way better off robbing a corner store or a restaurant where there’s at least a few bucks in the cash register.
How common it is to hear about something and how common that thing actually is aren’t necessarily closely related.
We hear about things in the news because they’re good stories, not because they’re statistically significant. And bank robberies are about as good as stories come.
My guess for why this isn’t done is that the expected loss due to hauling the ATM away isn’t worth the cost of including the hardware to track it. A battery and transmitter capable of sending a GPS signal not just through the ATM housing but also through whatever (probably metal-bodied) truck the thieves are taking it away in isn’t necessarily a minor trivial detail.
Plus, there are probably other good enough ways to find ATM thieves. The first one that comes to my mind is that it’s not hard or expensive to know what serial numbers are on the bills in the ATM, and once those start making their way back into circulation, you can find the thieves. And you know those serial numbers because there are already optical scanners in ATMs and banks used to track cash deposits.
(Snipped to provide clarify for what I’m responding to.)
Really, just a thousand dollars? If so, this immediately makes me wonder who ‘feeds’ the baby ATMs and how. If we assume that the average customer withdraws a hundred bucks for his two dollar fee, (which seems a bit low on the withdrawl side,) then baby is good for ten customers, earning a total $20 fee, before he needs to be fed more bills. Does somebody with the ATM company have to drive out to the gas station and refill him, or would there be somebody on-site at the station who could do that?
Also, while I’m wondering about the economics of baby ATMs, does the gas station owner/operator/whatever pay to keep baby ATM at his venue? Seems to me that having baby around will pay off for him, both in terms of attracting customers and enabling them to buy more from him.
Insurance covers the losses for an ATM theft, and if it really were that much of a problem, then the insurance fees would become prohibitively expensive. At that stage, it would be cheaper to come up with more solutions.
If you look at the number of ATMs around, and the actual number of theft, it’s a very tiny percentage.
My WAG is that the companies manufacturing the ATMs don’t install them because it would make their products more expensive over the competition which did. The insurance is to be paid by the new owner of the ATM, so they don’t have to worry about it.
