HOUSTON -- Sometime after midnight on June 13, someone rammed a stolen pickup truck through the front of Sayeed Ali's gas station in Houston. The truck got stuck, so the miscreants had to abandon their target: the station's ATM. They weren't there to steal the money from the ATM, reported MSNBC, they were there to steal the entire machine—keyboard, screen, vault and all.
"This is the first time something like this has ever happened to this store in over 10 years," Ali, the station's manager, told MSNBC. But then he added something that police around the country already know: "My [image-nocss] brother just told me that this is happening everywhere, especially this kind of thing targeting the ATM."
Houston police said the June 13 break-in was at least the seventh operation by a ring of smash-and-grab operators who steal large pickup trucks and crash them into storefronts to get at the ATM. They attach a chain to the back of the truck, wrap it around the ATM and yank the machine out of the store.
Other thieves, especially in rural areas dotted with construction sites, bring in a stolen forklift and just drive off with the ATM.The whole operation can take less than five minutes, and if the ATM has been recently replenished, the thieves can get away with tens of thousands of dollars—assuming they can figure out how to crack open the vault.
And for a variety of reasons, police said, the crime is spiking in astonishing numbers this year. The FBI tracks ATM thefts in its annual Bank Crime Statistics survey. In 2006, the last year for which complete figures are available, 119 thefts of ATMs were reported to the FBI, according to the report. Since 2000, the number has increased approximately between 100 and 200, it said.
Already this year, authorities report more than 140 ATM thefts in North Texas alone, mainly in the Dallas area. Police said organized rings may have been at work there and in Houston, Atlanta, San Diego and Los Angeles; multiple thefts have also been reported in numerous other cities, from Hartford, Conn., to Detroit to Honolulu, said MSNBC.
See related feature, "7-Eleven ATMs Compromised: Hackers break into Citibank's network of c-store cash machines," in this issue of CSP Daily News.Members help make our journalism possible. Become a CSP member today and unlock exclusive benefits, including unlimited access to all of our content. Sign up here.