In the early morning hours of May 6, 2023, an explosion occurred in a bank in the German town of Bad Homburg, sending shattered glass as far as 30 meters away. Two men had broken into the building and filled the ATM with explosives. Once the device did its job, they grabbed ₹165,000 ($1,80,287) in cash, jumped into the waiting getaway car and rushed off into the night.The theft took just a couple of minutes.
Almost every day — or usually, every night — an ATM is blown up somewhere in Germany. Europe’s biggest economy has become the prime target for sophisticated smash-and-grab operations by organized criminal groups. Very few people rob banks anymore, it’s not worth it. ATM bombings are quicker, less risky and the payouts are significantly higher.
The Federal Criminal Police Office has been monitoring this type of crime since 2005, when numbers started to rise across Europe. “We see ATM blasts all over the world, but the intensity that we experience in Germany is really in a league of its own,” said Stefan Lessmann, head of security at ATM-maker Diebold Nixdorf, the market leader for the machines in the EU.
The reasons behind this are simple: Germany borders the Netherlands, which is home to the Amsterdam and Utrecht-based networks that orchestrate most of the attacks. The Netherlands had previously been the epicentre of these bombings, but by 2015, the Dutch had reduced the number of ATMs nationally from 20,000 to 5,000. With few targets left in their home county, the perpetrators went east: to Germany.
What they found was a paradise. There are more than 50,000 ATMs in Germany, and as the national central bank put it in a Jan report, “cash has a special social significance.” A 2023 Bundesbank study says the vast majority of Germany’s 83.3 million inhabitants live within a kilometre of an ATM. And the country’s extensive national highway network gives attackers an easy way to escape.
Almost every day — or usually, every night — an ATM is blown up somewhere in Germany. Europe’s biggest economy has become the prime target for sophisticated smash-and-grab operations by organized criminal groups. Very few people rob banks anymore, it’s not worth it. ATM bombings are quicker, less risky and the payouts are significantly higher.
The Federal Criminal Police Office has been monitoring this type of crime since 2005, when numbers started to rise across Europe. “We see ATM blasts all over the world, but the intensity that we experience in Germany is really in a league of its own,” said Stefan Lessmann, head of security at ATM-maker Diebold Nixdorf, the market leader for the machines in the EU.
The reasons behind this are simple: Germany borders the Netherlands, which is home to the Amsterdam and Utrecht-based networks that orchestrate most of the attacks. The Netherlands had previously been the epicentre of these bombings, but by 2015, the Dutch had reduced the number of ATMs nationally from 20,000 to 5,000. With few targets left in their home county, the perpetrators went east: to Germany.
What they found was a paradise. There are more than 50,000 ATMs in Germany, and as the national central bank put it in a Jan report, “cash has a special social significance.” A 2023 Bundesbank study says the vast majority of Germany’s 83.3 million inhabitants live within a kilometre of an ATM. And the country’s extensive national highway network gives attackers an easy way to escape.
