A lot of daily activities became more dangerous due to the pandemic, but you wouldn’t expect that stopping by the ATM is one of those. However, according to Travelers, ATMs are increasingly becoming targeted by thieves during COVID-19, with attempts to break into ATMs more than doubling in the last year and Travelers seeing a 220% increase in the number of ATM “smash and grab” claims from 2019 to 2020.
The money machines are prime targets for thieves, considering that people are turning to ATMs to take out cash and conduct other transactions, rather than entering a bank or because they have to use an ATM due to temporary branch closures. As a result of this demand, banks now hold more cash than ever before in their ATMs, with up to $350,000 sitting in an automated machine, ripe for the taking at any moment.
“We have seen this before, when we had the great recession back in 2009. Shortly thereafter, we saw a lot of bank robberies taking place because people were desperate for money,” said Tracey Santor, 2VP bond product manager for financial institutions at Travelers. “At first, we thought this might be the same kind of thing … but, in reviewing some of the articles and police reports, it appears that it could be gang-related … It seems to be much more organized, with a larger group of people involved in each one of the attempts to take an ATM.”
The loss for the financial institution is not just the money that’s taken out of the ATM. It’s also the damage that’s done to the premises during each of these attempts, whether it’s successful or not. For instance, back in May 2020, police officers in Waterloo, ON responded to a break and enter at a grocery store, where the thieves smashed the front door of the store and used a black SUV to drag the ATM out of the front of the building.
To limit the risk of significant damage, and the ATM being stolen in the first place, businesses can do a few basic things. The first one is ensuring that the ATM is well lit, and placing them in locations that are visible to people and security cameras so that the thieves know that they’re being watched. Alarms can also be rigged in such a way that they’re linked to the police units in the area, so that if an ATM is jostled, the action would alert authorities.
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“Banks can also do things like use cement poles around the ATM to prevent vehicles from approaching it without doing drastic damage to the vehicle,” said Santor. “We’ve seen that a lot of the ways that these incidents are occurring is the robber is stealing a large truck and using that to ram it into the building, or they’re hooking a chain up to the back of the truck and pulling the ATM.”
Some security companies are even placing dye packs in ATMs, so that when the machine is moved, the dye pack explodes and the money inside is rendered useless, noted Santor. Placing a GPS in the ATM is another risk mitigation method that’s being used to immediately identify where the robber has taken the ATM, and hopefully stop them before they open it up and take the money out.
Anything that a bank or credit union does to make it visibly more difficult for thieves to perpetrate the crime can dissuade the criminals from targeting that business. As a result, Travelers is working side by side with financial institutions to encourage them to implement these and many other risk management methods to fend off thieves, during what is already a perilous time for many businesses.
“We have developed some outside documents that we give to our customers to explain the risk and walk them through some of the measures that they can take to protect themselves,” said Santor.
