Perfect Crime

IT all happened within a few minutes. At 4am on Saturday a stolen car rammed through the glass doors of a shopping centre. Working rapidly with planned precision, five to six men loaded a free-standing ATM into a stolen late-model Toyota van and drove away with up to $300,000. The police dog squad conducted an extensive search and found nothing, again.
It was another successful ATM ram raid in Sydney's latest crime wave. It's a fast, easy, low-risk and highly lucrative crime. No one gets physically hurt and it's a major adrenalin rush for the perpetrators.
More than 20 free standing or easy-to-access ATMs have been pulled, knocked or cut from their mountings before being loaded on to vans or trucks and stolen in the past three months in Sydney. Thieves have escaped with up to $6 million. Police refuse to say exactly how much has been taken but the machines can contain up to $300,000.
There are 6000 ATMs in NSW alone, a potential and easily accessible gold mine of up to $1.8 billion for thieves.
The crimes, however, are far from simple. They require speed, accuracy and co-ordination and take little more than three minutes for gangs to ram through the front door of a bank or shopping centre, dislodge the ATM and load it into the back of a van.
All that is then needed to get the money out of the ATM is an angle grinder. The vans are normally found burnt out with the empty ATM still inside.
The raids often involve four stolen cars -- a four-wheel-drive( for American friends an SUV) to do the ramming, a van to take away the ATM and two high-powered sports cars for the gang members to flee in, fast.
The speed of the crimes and the getaways make it difficult for police to catch the thieves or for witnesses to provide much detail. So frequent and so well organised has this form of crime become in Sydney that a special investigation unit, Strike Force Piccadilly, was established last month by the NSW Police.
Despite the high visibility and audacious nature of the crimes, there have been few arrests, although police believe they've cracked two of the estimated six gangs, made up of about 30 men.
Rather clever, instead of stolen goods, they're going for cash, leaving out the middle man! Long gone are the days of the ol staged bank robbery....way too difficult these days, so the ATM it is.
Of course, we could try dye bombs, like in the US and the UK, however Australian money is polymer so the dye wouldn't take. Whilst our polymer money has been successful in lowering money laundering and counterfitting crimes, it makes it difficult wen it comes to this one.
Not too sure what the answer is, i hope they think of something before crime such as this crosses the border into Queensland!

till next time, Michelle.