Heist heads absolutely feasting this year !
Reuters-
Thieves drill into German bank vault and make off with millions
BERLIN, Dec 30 (Reuters) - Thieves used the quiet Christmas period to drill their way into the vault of a German retail bank and make off with at least 10 million euros' worth of money and valuables from customers' deposit boxes, police said on Tuesday.
The perpetrators drilled through a thick concrete wall at a branch of Sparkasse bank in the western city of Gelsenkirchen and then broke into several thousand safe deposit boxes and stole a sum estimated in the double-digit millions of euros, the police said in a statement.
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Most shops and banks close in Germany over the Christmas period starting from the evening of December 24, and police only discovered the hole after a fire alarm went off in the early hours of Monday, December 29.
Dozens of angry customers gathered in front of the bank on Tuesday loudly chanting "Let us in!".
A hole gapes in a wall after thieves drilled into the vault of a Sparkasse savings bank in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, December 29, 2025, in this image released December 30, 2025, by the police.... Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab Read more
"I couldn't sleep last night. We're getting no information," one man told the Welt broadcaster as he waited outside the branch, adding that he had been using the safe for 25 years and that it contained his savings for old age.
Another man said he used his deposit box to store cash and jewellery for his family.
A spokesperson for the Sparkasse bank in Gelsenkirchen did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Police said witnesses have reported that they saw several men on Saturday night carrying large bags in the stairwell of an adjacent parking garage.
There were also reports of a black Audi RS 6 leaving the garage early on Monday morning with masked men inside. The vehicle's licence plate was that of a car stolen in Hanover, more than 200 kilometres to the northeast of Gelsenkirchen, police said.
Reporting by Rachel More; Editing by Hugh Lawson
I've never seen an ATM that was only open during bank hours. However, a lot of smaller branches have switched over to not having the ATMs open 24 hours anymore and will close doors sometime around midnight or so. This is due to theft risk. Over recent years, it has become a fairly common heist tactic to attack ATMs, originally with methods like "put a steel cable around it, tie it to a truck and pull the entire thing out of its armaments to carry it away and crack it later", but nowadays they usually just pump propane gas into it and blow it up. Yes, i know, the money cache inside is secured with paint bombs and things like that, but apparently there are ways around that if you know what you're doing. And the crews who specialize in these heists absolutely do, because they took a pretty close look at the inner workings of ATMs back when they still stole the entire machines. Cops actually found a workshop in the Netherlands where these things up were set up to practice both cracking the money caches and blowing up the machines to get to the caches. And these people are fast. Takes them just a couple minutes from arrival to speeding away in something like the Audi RS6 mentioned in the article (high speed getaways are a standard part of these heists).
This happens a lot. Like, we're talking a break-in every other day in Northrhine-Westphalia (the state bordering the Netherlands), and this thing has been going on for a couple of years. The cost of reinforcing all ATMs would be too high compared to the amount of money inside the machine, so the banks have decided that their solution to this is to restrict opening hours instead. Their customers are used to being treated like shit by their banks anyway, so they go along with it.
well and here in NL most non standalone ATMs (such as the ones with residents around or above) close at 10 pm to lessen the chance of ppl getting blown up.