
Is it still possible to get away with a heist? - sasvari
http://s.telegraph.co.uk/graphics/projects/Hatton-Garden-is-it-still-possible-to-get-away-with-a-heist/index.html
======
Jerry2
The most interesting gang I've come across recently are the Pink Panthers.
They specialize in jewelry and high-priced/luxury items.

Check out this Wikipedia summary:

> _Named after The Pink Panther series of crime comedy films, Pink Panthers is
> the name given by Interpol to an international jewel thief network, composed
> mainly of ethnic Serbs, Montenegrins and Bosniaks, which is responsible for
> some of the most audacious thefts in criminal history.[2] They are
> responsible for what have been termed some of the most glamorous heists
> ever, and one criminologist even described their crimes as "artistry".[1]
> They have targeted several countries and continents, and include Japan's
> most successful robbery ever amongst their thefts. A film documentary based
> upon their thefts, Smash & Grab, was released in 2013._

> _Some law enforcement agencies suspect that the group is responsible for
> over US$500 million in gold robberies in Dubai, Switzerland, Japan, France,
> Liechtenstein, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain and Monaco. Law enforcement
> authorities suspect their involvement in the robbery of the jewelry store
> Harry Winston in Paris, on 9 December 2008. The thieves escaped with more
> than €80 million worth of jewelry._

Fascinating!

Rest:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Panthers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Panthers)

So to answer that rhetorical question whether "it is still possible to get
away with a heist"... well, yes, if you are are really, really good at it.

~~~
auggierose
Oops, I thought the Pink Panthers were an invention by the TV show "White
Collar" :-)

~~~
embik
That Wikipedia article definitely reads like straight out of "White Collar".

------
vosper
At least 10% of the $61B of assistance the US sent to Iraq can't be accounted
for [1]. Since it can't be accounted for it's hard to say conclusively that it
was stolen, but someone (or more likely, many someones) somewhere has it...

[1] [http://www.cnbc.com/2014/06/19/how-the-us-lost-billions-
over...](http://www.cnbc.com/2014/06/19/how-the-us-lost-billions-over-nine-
years-in-iraq.html)

~~~
sandworm101
From a rather underrated film... "You don't actually think they spend $20,000
on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you?"

~~~
tahssa
Yeah, 6.9 on imdb is a little low for that film.

~~~
Bulkington
Uh... excuse me, Mr. President? That's not entirely accurate.

[[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116629/quotes?item=qt0388832](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116629/quotes?item=qt0388832)]

------
sametmax
Got a story for you. A recent one.

In 2013 , in France, we had the biggest jewerly heist of the country's last
ten years ( [http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-
france/2015/05](http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2015/05)).

It was in Cannes, a city known for it's movie festival. The place is pretty
rich, as you can imagine, because of the stars handing around and the fact
it's in the south of France, on a sunny beach.

On that day, there was a Jewelry gallery called "Extraordinary Diamond" at the
Carlton hotel and some guy arrived ALONE, with only a mask and a gun. He took
103 millions euros worth of goods, then went away. Nobody heard of him since.

So yeah, it's still possible to get away with a heist.

~~~
neppo
that link doesn't seem to work

~~~
nandemo
Not sure what link OP meant, but try this one:

[http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-
france/2013/07/28/01016-201...](http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-
france/2013/07/28/01016-20130728ARTFIG00079-des-bijoux-d-une-valeur-
de-40-millions-d-euros-voles-a-cannes.php)

------
silveira
Yes. Brazil's central bank heist in 2005. Only a fraction of the R$ 160
million (USD $71.6 million at 2005 exchange rate) were ever recovered.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banco_Central_burglary_at_Fort...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banco_Central_burglary_at_Fortaleza)

~~~
nandemo
Managing to execute that heist is pretty amazing, but it's debatable whether
they "got away" with it.

One alleged mastermind was kidnapped and murdered, even though his family paid
the ransom. Another was arrested. Many other suspects were eventually
kidnapped or arrested.

Also, I'm very skeptical about the reported figures for the recovered money,
especially since part of it was found by the Military Police (which has a bad
reputation for corruption in Brazil) instead of the Federal Police (which is
relatively reliable).

------
a_bonobo
Crown Casino in Melbourne lost $32 million in 2013 after a "foreign national"
gained access to the security system to check out opponent's cards.

[http://www.geek.com/news/thieves-hack-casino-cameras-pull-
of...](http://www.geek.com/news/thieves-hack-casino-cameras-pull-off-
simple-32-million-scam-1543101/)

I'd imagine that the guy who pulled it off must have been already rich, you
can't quickly win that amount of money by betting tiny amounts (in Australia),
you have to start off with something big. There have been no news since then
so I assume they flew home and got away with it.

>Described by one source as a "whale" \- a gambler who wins and loses huge
amounts - he was hit with a withdrawal of licence notice, prohibiting him from
entering the Southbank complex. It is believed he has since returned to his
home country.

[http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/crown-casino-
hi-t...](http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/crown-casino-hi-tech-scam-
nets-32-million/story-fnat79vb-1226597666337)

------
kev009
It's still possible for a 777 to vanish.

I think people constantly over estimate our generalized competence. Just
because technology exists doesn't mean it is widely deployed or even used
properly when done so. And even if it is, the humans behind it are often the
weakest link and can be tricked or forced to defeat it.

So yes, there is a lot of room for heist in spite of technology. The hard part
remains as it always is.. human element, political element for reaching
"safety" or escaping easy identification/capture, etc.

------
tyingq
Bitcoin is mentioned in the article, but only in the context of "thousands of
tiny thefts from ordinary people".

That description doesn't match the bitcoin heists over the past few years. Mt
Gox alone was $460M USD. I suspect some of the individual losses weren't uh,
tiny.

~~~
moron4hire
It wasn't a mountain named Gox.

~~~
tyingq
Ah, yes, an errant space. Or a missing period. My humblest apologies. Looks
like you figured out what I meant though.

------
eatkinson
The largest heist of all time was in 1990[1], which I consider pretty recent.
The tools they needed to pull it off (impersonating the police mainly) seem
like they could still work today.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Stewart_Gardner_Museu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Stewart_Gardner_Museum_theft)

~~~
kqr
1990 means basically "they didn't even have digital cameras". In the context,
that is not recent at all.

------
vic-traill
>Something similar has happened in the USA, where they > fell by 60 per cent
between 2004 and 2014 [0]

I think it is bad form to state the British decline in 'heists' as absolute
numbers and then the US decline as a percentage. It obscures the point.

Moreover, the headline article's calculated decline in US heists is 'fell by
60 per cent between 2004 and 2014'; however the article it references [1]
states a reduction from 6822 to 3961, which I interpret as a 42% decline.

Or my reading comprehension skills are completely foobar'd this evening.

I don't know that it is entirely fair of me, but my tendency is to become more
skeptical of the article overall when attention to smaller details like these
are lacking.

[0] Headline Article [1] [http://www.cnbc.com/2015/05/14/todays-bonnie-and-
clydes-gett...](http://www.cnbc.com/2015/05/14/todays-bonnie-and-clydes-
getting-tougher-to-find.html)

------
ChuckMcM
I suspect that "heists" have lost their popularity because its easier to steal
money with skimmers or by CC fraud.

That said it is always interesting to see people do things like the smash and
grab burglaries in Marseilles or the Riviera.

~~~
joezydeco
In Chicago we had a rash of smash-and-grabs where the burglars would plow a
stolen SUV into the front of a Coach or or Apple or Louis Vuitton store, grab
everything in sight, and be gone within a minute.

One enterprising crew actually drove through the front doors of Northbrook
Court Mall at 5 AM, drove _through the mall_ to reach the Louis Vuitton store,
and then completed the job.

[http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Burglars-Crash-Car-
Into...](http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Burglars-Crash-Car-Into-
Northbrook-Louis-Vuitton-283060761.html)

They didn't fare as well with Abt Electronics a few miles away:

[http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Burglars-Leave-With-
Not...](http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Burglars-Leave-With-Nothing-in-
Attempted-Glenview-Smash-and-Grab-295751341.html)

~~~
tajen
Why would anyone bust an Apple store!? Would you bust a GPS store? I've always
assumed Apple had a custom IMEI-based remote deactivation service for all its
stores.

~~~
joezydeco
My assumption is that the burglars are pretty unaware of remote
tracking/disabling/serial number recording and/or the Apple demo devices on
the tables aren't set up with an iCloud "Find My Device" profiles, especially
the non-iPhone machines.

One Apple Store out in the suburbs has been hit multiple times. Three times in
one year. Seems like the glass they damage is worth more than the machines
they manage to steal:

[http://patch.com/illinois/naperville/masked-burglars-
strike-...](http://patch.com/illinois/naperville/masked-burglars-strike-apple-
store-for-third-time)

------
citricsquid

        The Hatton Garden raid was meticulous in its planning, dazzling 
        in its complexity – yet still the burglars were caught.
    

I disagree with this premise. The Hatton Garden heist only made it as far as
it did because of a number of failings outside of the gangs control, that they
didn't expect. The heist was doomed to fail from the start and only made it as
far as it did because of a lot of good fortune on the gangs behalf.

~~~
baudehlo
IIRC They got caught by bragging about it. Not having a post-heist plan seems
like a big failing.

~~~
banku_brougham
+1 post-heist plan. Every good heist movie addresses this.

------
RachelF
A better plan is the white collar crime done by the bankers up to 2008. Being
too big to jail and having good lobbyists is the 21st century way to get away
with a heist.

~~~
api
It's an old joke at this point. If you're stupid and want to rob a bank, first
you get a gun and a mask. If you're smart you get a banking license and a
Federal Reserve account...

------
orionblastar
Technology has changed it so a physical heist is harder to pull off and get
away with.

The people doing heists and getting away with it crack the security on a
website and steal the database and sell the information in it. I think that
electronic heists are easier to get away with than physical heists. Plus the
company targeted will just use PR to try and cover up the fact that they got
cracked or issue a warning to their users that someone accessed their
information. Identity Theft is growing but the people who steal personal
information sell it to others to raise the money they need so the people they
sell it to get caught instead of themselves.

------
simplicio
I wonder how much of the drop is due to simply having less physical cash lying
around to steal, as most economic transactions move to electronic payment
methods. I know pickpocketing has fallen off as lack of cash means thieves end
up with quickly cancelled credit cards and hard to pawn smartphones instead of
untraceable cash.

Obviously banks still need to keep some cash on hand, but I'd think that most
smaller banks (which are presumably the easier ones to rob) would've abandoned
keeping the classic "giant vault with stacks of cash". (the article brings
this up briefly, but doesn't really quantify it). And as the number of places
that do have big piles of cash decreases, the amount of resources that can be
put into protecting each one increases, so you'd expect the difficulty of
robbing them to increase faster then linerally with decreasing numbers sites.

------
Theodores
Is it still possible to find a poorly defended target?

 _Yes._

The security at Hatton Garden was poor. Over that Easter weekend the vault was
left completely unattended. When the burglars did set off the alarm the
security guard did not check the vault, he checked whether the front door had
been unlocked and left it at that.

There was nobody watching CCTV from inside the vault although the main
building had CCTV the vault wasn't exactly protected that way.

One of the burglars did turn up at the scene of the crime in his own car, this
was a bit stupid!!! That gave the Flying Squad all the information they needed
to start investigating the gang.

So, in response to the question, it is perfectly possible to steal poorly
defended valuables where poorly defended means no CCTV etc.

As for whether it is possible to escape through a built up area with the
stolen goods, the stolen goods part is irrelevant, is it possible to go
missing in a city? Yes!

------
sneak
There have been several high-profile bitcoin heists in the last few years,
some of the larger ones yielding many millions of effectively untraceable
cash.

Also, how much of this is due to parallel construction resulting from the
collaboration between the intel agencies and their investigative counterparts?

------
pakled_engineer
There's still the occasional massive European airport heist
[http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/robbers-
seize-50m...](http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/robbers-seize-50m-in-
diamonds-from-plane-in-brussels/story-e6frg6so-1226581510442) and other
airport heists [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-
america-28770199](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-28770199)

Big heists don't happen as much mainly due to benefit denial. Banks and
armored cars don't carry the kinds of cash they used to, so robbing them isn't
worth the risk, however it still is worth robbing an airport or shipping docks
if you have inside help so that crime persists.

Here most advanced criminals just get into money laundering or counterfeiting,
like that guy who served exactly zero time in prison for being caught with
100s of millions worth of phony USD [http://www.gq.com/long-form/the-great-
paper-caper](http://www.gq.com/long-form/the-great-paper-caper)

~~~
LaurentVB
At least for the Brussels one: the heist happened and was quite impressive,
but the burglars didn't get away with it. They were caught pretty rapidly,
weren't they?

~~~
pakled_engineer
Took about 2 years to catch them all but that was only due to the criminals
having no idea how to fence their stolen loot
[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/spectacular-3...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/spectacular-30m-jewel-
heist-ends-in-farce-as-bungled-attempts-to-get-rid-of-gems-leads-to-arrest-
of-8662354.html)

------
sdegutis
I was particularly impressed by that guy who robbed banks, never got caught,
turned himself in, and did an AMA. In his own words, he "studied and perfected
the art of bank robbery".

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/39b67t/im_a_retired_ba...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/39b67t/im_a_retired_bank_robber_ama/)

------
easytiger
Pretty much, though it took organised paramilitary involvment and a tense
political peace balance:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Bank_robbery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Bank_robbery)

------
bunkydoo
Of course it is, it just happens to look nothing like it did before the advent
of the internet.

------
tempodox
Dang, so I won't have a career as a robber. But the movie pictures are a
nostalgic treat. The article presentation is the best I've seen recently.

------
sjg007
Did you forget 2008?

------
banku_brougham
I managed to abscond with two bottles of Fiji water from a London hotel
minibar, without paying. Would have cost me £16!

~~~
rubberstamp
:) LOL so much at this. Don't try any more heists though

------
teddyh
The easiest way to rob a bank is to own it.

------
paulpauper
loading this nearly crashed my browser

~~~
cwkoss
Horrible web ui

~~~
grkvlt
Yes. I have a plugin that disables rendering of text in my browser, and all I
could see were the images. How do web designers imagine they can get away with
this?

------
samstave
Tangent:

I'm starting to be convinced of a genetic tie to how the Slavic peoples have a
particular mental mutation that gives them +11 to intelligence/cunning in a
wider offering than is generally distributed to the global population.

We have seen, consistently, over history their contributions and excelling
behavior in whatever area...

There is something to say about this particular mutation that the Slavic DNA
has.

Please do not equate what I am saying with any Arian bullshit that's not what
I mean: I have met a TON of Slavic people that have prodigy level
capabilities.

Tesla being my ultimate example of a Slavic person who has mental capacity
beyond...

A best friend of mine has a ___five year old son_ __who can speak three
languages...

We need to determine how why this happens?

All peoples are awesome and amazing and beautiful, but the density of extreme-
high-level-scientific contribution from a particular genetic group needs to be
looked at.

I just find this to be statistically very weird and interesting!

Is this real or perceived?

~~~
dang
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10936027](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10936027)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
samstave
Thanks - I know that I may have poorly articulated my thought - I was not
trying to sound racist or anything of that nature - so apologies if it came
across that way... I am just genuinely interested in why it may seem,
apparently only to me, that so many really smart people seem to come from a
small area of the world.

Anyway - feel free to just delete the comment.

~~~
dang
I believe you, and in face-to-face conversation I'm sure your sincere
curiosity would have been clear.

------
maxharris
No, it was never possible to get away with a heist, and it never will be.

The question of the authorities catching you is actually the least interesting
part of the question. Suppose you weren't caught by the police following your
heist:

How would you have any confidence in yourself in your ability to make it on
your own? How could you help but wonder if you'd be able to live by way of
producing or providing something of value the way honest people do?

What would happen to your curiosity about the world? There would be whole
swaths of things that would be mentally off-limits, lest they remind you of
anything to do with the danger of being caught for the heist you pulled.
(Think all of the things that fall under forensic or other evidence!)

As a secondary consideration, your relations with other people would also be
terrible. Where are you going to go where you won't have to weave a web of
lies about where you got your money from? How happy will you be living a life
where you are constantly in fear of getting caught? What kind of life is it to
know that your continued existence depends on others _not_ knowing certain
facts about the world? (Facts that they have every right to know about you...)
If someone wrongs you, or does something unjust to someone or some thing you
care about, how could you work up the courage to rectify that? Your own
hypocrisy would likely stifle any such impulse, before you ever spoke a word
of it.

~~~
s_q_b
None of these factors would matter to a high-functioning sociopath, or for
that matter a sufficiently desperate individual.

But the game is not really to make theft impossible.

It's to make theft so difficult that all the people intelligent enough to pull
it off go into other occupations.

~~~
maxharris
First, I didn't say the act of theft was impossible (this interpretation of my
comment is possible only if you stop reading my comment after the first
sentence, ignoring completely the words that follow it.)

With regard to your comments on sociopaths, please see my reply to ryandrake
immediately below.

