News

When is a bank robbery not a bank robbery? When it's a bank ATM

August 15, 2017

A lecturer at Birmingham City University in the Midlands region of England has put forward an interesting theory to explain a rash of ATM ram raids in that part of the country:

Stealing an ATM full of cash is classified as theft, not robbery (not to mention bank robbery), and carries a much lighter jail sentence for the crook who gets caught.

"[R]am-raiding an ATM means, technically speaking, you haven't even broken into a property because ATMs are external protrusions, even though they might be embedded in the wall," Dr. John Bahadur Lamb, a lecturer in criminology and security studies, said in a report by the Birmingham Mail. "At the most you might face a charge of aggravated theft but that's not going to mean as much jail time as an armed robbery."

Never mind that your chances of success in a ram raid on an ATM are exceedingly slim, given modern ATM construction and installation practices.

The Mail cited an incident in July in which a gang rammed a Mercedes van into a Barclay's bank on a busy throughfare — in broad daylight — in an unsuccessful attempt to steal its ATM, and a similar (unsuccessful) attack more recently on a Halifax Bank ATM.

While the majority of attacks fail, they do result in significant damage to buildings, and cause "genuine distress" among residents who depend on the ATM for cash outside of banking hours, police told the Mail.