www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-16556547
One has to wonder how this tunnel could be dug and the rubble disposed of without somebody getting suspicious.
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The Great Escape......................With a cash machine top job guys well done!!
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...top job guys well done!!...
Very generous of you Bigtee to donate to thieves.
The customers of the machine's operator will pay, one way or another.
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As the machine was in a branch of Blockbuster my guess is that the customers have already paid! About £1.50 per withdrawal!
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...my guess is that the customers have already paid!...
They hadn't paid for the cash inside it, which is presumably what the thieves were after.
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So the police reckon it could have taken up to 6 months, and I assume there were at least 2 people involved. Just how much do you think they got away with? I can't imagine the cash machine in a blockbusters holds a huge amount of cash? Must be more profitable ways of spending your time!
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Maybe they think it's a sort of golden goose that prints money.
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The full-size cash machines have cassettes of money each containing £20K, and there could be five or so cassettes.
Downside is the cassettes are quite difficult to break into, any tampering and the money is soiled with dye, which comes out with some force.
I covered a case in which the police found the breached cassette in the thief's kitchen, and dye all over him and his kitchen walls and ceiling.
This machine was probably one of the smaller 'free standing' ones.
I wonder if the money in that type of machine is less securely stored, which is why the thieves went for one of those, rather than a bigger one.
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I used to fix cash machines, many years ago. If you ignore the first one chance card chubb machines I worked in Generation 1,2, & 3.
G 3 had two cartridges* with different denomination notes, each hopper had a max of 5k notes, denominations used in machines then was £5 & £10.
Given the amount of money in the BB one, was it really worth all the effort. Drive through the front window and haul it on the back of a lorry is the way surely.
I have a bookload of humorous stories about working on those things, the best times of my career.
*Cartridges loaded by bank staff with cash, these days most are loaded outside the branch by G4S
G1 & 2 had no carts, just hoppers. Took an age to load properly so they wouldn't jam.
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and dye all over him and his kitchen walls and ceiling.
I suppose if the was Welsh he'd be known as Dai Dye...
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...I suppose if the was Welsh he'd be known as Dai Dye...
Regrettably, the dye was orange, which robbed me of the line: 'caught red handed'.
Think I used 'orange handed' in the story somewhere, but it didn't carry the same resonance.
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WOOOOO Missed out on references to "Tango'd" then?
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...Missed out on references to "Tango'd" then?...
I once successfully suggested to a barrister he should describe an undercover cop who had been assaulted in a chip shop as having been 'battered'.
It went over the jury's head, but we enjoyed the little in joke.
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Perhaps you did not detect my tongue slightly in my cheek! Possibly they were on holiday from the team digging the Crossrail project in London? People are right to think there wouldn't be much cash in a machine in that Blochbuster.
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As a sprog I had Midland Bank account which allowed me to get ten quid from their ATM's the tenner was delivered in a little clip that was posted back in the box when you pulled your beer voucher out - your card was indented every time you used to allow you to keep track of how much beer you drank.....I was a real culture shock that the ones with a VDU appeared...
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My first was the Chubb machine in National Westminster.
One was provided with a credit card sized sheet of thin plastic with holes punched all over it (it was a kind of 1/4 sized 80 column card punch)
Stuff that in the machine, it would swallow your card, and deliver a 10 pound note in a little envelope. Your card would be posted back to you, arriving three days later, to use again.
Last edited by: Zero on Sat 14 Jan 12 at 09:44
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You are right Zero! That was a seriously long time ago; when one had a named bank manager with whom one could book an appointment and have a conversation! I remember mine - a Mr Chambers-Jones at Lloyds Holyhead instead of the current "Tracy - Customer Services Advisor"
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>> when one had a
>> named bank manager with whom one could book an appointment and have a conversation!
Wouldn't call it a conversation as such, He had a very short vocabulary, seem to recall it consisted only of the word NO!
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Does anyone actually go into a bank at all these days for reasons other than finding a cash machine? Haven't been in mine for over a year.
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I do. Haven't used a cash machine for years.
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A friend of mine - about my age - refuses to use cashpoints, so still goes to the branch to write a cheque for cash.
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I have to ask why? Personally I always use a machine instead of a person if I can. Bank on line, use automated check out and scan at supermarket, buy rail ticket at the machine, buy anything I can on-line. Just so much quicker and more efficient all round.
Brought up in an era of queues. Modern world is so much better
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>> I have to ask why? Personally I always use a machine instead of a person
>> if I can.
I don’t find popping into my local bank two or three times a month to pay in cheques, etc, and to withdraw what little amount of cash that we need to supplement our credit and debit card purchases, much of a problem. In fact, I quite enjoy a bit of banter with the staff, most of whom I’ve known for many years.
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twice in a year for me, both times to withdraw a bundle of cash larger than the cash machine would allow.
Wait - three times, once to pay in a large cheque and get a receipt at the counter. Don't trust the cheque deposit box.
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Last time for me was when we opened a giant piggy bank and had to deposit over a hundred pounds worth of small change.
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That was one of my habits, kicked it now though - I was watching (not staring you understand) one of the cast chucking hundreds of coins into one of those change machines, obviously not mean enough to pay the commission charge, I always counted and bagged mine before making myself unpopular at a branch !
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>> Last time for me was when we opened a giant piggy bank and had to
>> deposit over a hundred pounds worth of small change.
ooo no! I love to use the machine at the supermarket, it makes such a racket, so mechanical sounding - Lovely!
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What's the commission though, round here the little druggie scroats would get you on the way out.
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>> What's the commission though
Puts me off as well, 10 or possibly 20%? And last time it jammed, didn't all go through. No staff around.
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>>Puts me off as well, 10 or possibly 20%
I can't understand folk. It doesn't take that long to bag it up.
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So worse case scenario 20 quid on a £100's worth of change..
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>> >>Puts me off as well, 10 or possibly 20%
>>
>> I can't understand folk. It doesn't take that long to bag it up.
It's either do it as you're passing the machine on the way in to do your usual weekly shop, or make an unusual trip to the bank, bag it up, and make another unusual trip to pay it in. For the sake of one or 2 quid(?) once a year (in our case)... It's just irritating.
I hope that helps your understanding :)
Last edited by: Focus on Sat 14 Jan 12 at 12:07
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>>or make an unusual trip to the bank, bag it up, and make another unusual trip to pay it in.
You're making heavy weather of an otherwise simple task.
:)
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...or as we moles might say, you're making a molehill out of a wormcast.
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Barclays have a free one in the bigger branches now - the cash goes straight into your current account. Almost tempted to switch on that alone.
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>> Barclays have a free one in the bigger branches now - the cash goes straight
>> into your current account. Almost tempted to switch on that alone.
>>
HSBC have had them in my branch for at least 4 years IIRC - work on the same principle as the Barclays ones by the sound of it - just chuck the change in and its CR to your account, so if you don't like Barclays at least there's a choice!!
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>> Last time for me was when we opened a giant piggy bank and had to deposit over a hundred pounds worth of small change.
>>
Noooo!
I always offer to exchange my bagged coins for equivalent £notes at my local small shops.
They told me they get charged a fee by the banks for supplying bagged coins.
Every little helps - supporting my local shops.
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The big surprise is that they dug a tunnel there for the second time! And got away with it this time.
When they were building some new buildings next to the Blockbuster shop, they uncovered a tunnel and filled it in. As the story mentions this was back in 2007.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/6966764.stm
So the police said: "Det Sgt Ian Shore from Longsight CID said: "In all my years of service, I've never seen anything as elaborate." He obviously didn't see the tunnel in 2007 then.
Last edited by: rtj70 on Sat 14 Jan 12 at 13:03
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This comment to the police also made me smile: "Police were unable to say if it was the same Blockbuster store that had been targeted, but said it was not the same tunnel that had been used this time."
Well they filled the last tunnel with concrete. But how many Blockbuster stores would there be near the railway line in Fallowfield then?
tinyurl.com/7s4u7k4
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You really really have to admire the work that's gone into this, not least to dig 100 feet to hit a spot with an accuracy of 1 yard square.
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maybe they used GPS! - left the Antenna on the surface and used a long lead?!!
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>> - left the Antenna on the surface
...and that's the position which would be reported by the GPS :)
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My boat one had a plotter whereby you could enter a desired course, and then it would guide you there ;-)
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Really clever thieves won't go near the cash point machine.
Quite an ingenious fraud undertaken by the IT staff of a major UK bank:
www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/21/phantoms_and_rogues/
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It says in the article that they stole the cash, not the machine.
The machines are enormous and must weigh a ton - there is a kind of open-plan one in our Barclays and it is about the size of a phone box, although only having the standard panel on the outside.
If they tunelled up underneath it they would have been crushed as it sank into the hole. Or if they surfaced next to it, they presumably then knew how to break in, avoiding Iffy's patent orange squirting dye.
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Depending on which report you believe there was either £6K or £8K in the machine. A poor return for the time and effort.
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You'd get more for 6 months work on minimum wage! Especially since there was more than one of them...
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I did wonder how much was in there... I assumed they'd have waited until a day it had been refilled. Maybe it did still only have £6-8k... it was only a cash machine in a Blockbuster video store.
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I think they broke in on New Years day when the store was closed; I assume cash machines see pretty heavy use on New Year's Eve...
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>>I assumed they'd have waited until a day it had been refilled.
Cue the music
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIckHmwZAeI
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>> >>I assumed they'd have waited until a day it had been refilled.
>>
Bank machines are filled by contractors and can contain >£60K
Cornershop inhouse machines in are rented by the shop and the shop fills them from their cash in the till.
Many will contain just a few thousand and be topped up daily if necessary from cash in the till.
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Me too Henry - I have a coin sorter and keep out the useless 1p, 2p and 5p coins and swap them for £1 coins at my village shop or the mobile Post Office
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We bought our dog with the contents of one of those huge plastic Coca Cola bottle-bank things!
It helps of course, when your work has a coin counting machine :)
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So why called it finn?
It should have been "bob"!
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...or "Penny" - had a look at one of those machines on the set today - no mention of a commission charge - Coinstar make.
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Theft of a Cash Machine - Bigtee
