“We see ATM blasts all over the world, but the intensity that we experience in Germany is really in a league of its own.”
In Europe, people don’t tend to rob banks anymore — the risks are simply too high and, in most cases, the rewards too low. Instead, they are blowing up ATMs. And Germany is their “prime target.”
That’s according to an article published Saturday by Bloomberg. The EU’s largest economy, it says, is suffering ATM bombings on an almost daily basis, as efforts to wean the country off cash have “not been well received.” In a subheading to a German-language version of the article, Bloomberg warns that “the German love of cash” is one of the main drivers. From the English-language version:
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 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.
“A League of Its Own”
Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office has been collecting figures on ATM explosions since 2005. By 2015, the boom (pun intended) in ATM bombings was impossible to ignore. A year later, there were 318 bombings, and by 2022 the number had reached 496.
“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 Bloomberg article offers three main reasons reasons for why this might be.
1. Germany shares a border with the Netherlands, which is home to the Amsterdam and Utrecht-based networks that are orchestrating most of the attacks against the ATMs:
The Netherlands had previously been the epicenter of these bombings, but by 2015, the Dutch had reduced the number of ATMs nationally from 20,000 to 5,000, fortified the remaining ones, and encouraged businesses and residents to wean themselves off cash.
With few targets left in their home county, the perpetrators went east: to Germany…
… where they apparently encountered “a paradise for ATM bombers.” Which brings us to the second reason.
2. Germany is a bastion of cash. The Bloomberg piece underscores Germany’s high number of ATMs (just over 50,000) as one of the possible reasons why the ATM arsonists are targeting the country. Yet this is only a shade higher than the total number of ATMs in the UK, a country with 15 million fewer people than Germany, most of whom use cash a lot less than their German counterparts.
In its 2023 payments report Deutsche Bundesbank found cash was used for 51% of payments, with debit cards in second place at 27 percent. This was down from 58% in 2021, though the Bundesbank’s Executive Board Member Burkhard Balz said the “decline is no longer as pronounced as during the coronavirus pandemic.”
As the central bank noted in a January report, “cash has a special significance in Germany.” This is a problem for EU authorities, particularly the European Commission, which are keen to wean European citizens off cash as they prepare to launch a digital euro.
A year ago, Foreign Policy magazine ran an article headlined, “Germany is Hopelessly Addicted to Cash,” which provides a laundry list of reasons why Germans, in particular, are unwilling to part with the old ways — their instinctive distrust of overweening state control following their experience of totalitarian governance; their “obsession with privacy, mistrust of big-tech and fintech in general, and worries about political and financial crises depleting bank balances overnight — an experience rooted in history as well as a cultural desire for control”) while gently admonishing the country for “standing athwart the global trend toward cashless payments.”
German citizens may also be mindful of the fragility risks posed by a fully cashless economy — after all, the country suffered a significant card payment outage just two years ago. As we reported last month, the sheer size and number of recent payment outages has even prompted British mainstream media establishments to warn of the “potential perils” of a fully cashless economy.
There are myriad other reasons why a fully cashless society is far from desirable, including the inevitability of more granular surveillance, the loss of one of our last vestiges of personal privacy and anonymity, the exclusionary effects it will have on those who are unable to access or use digital technologies, and the much greater power and control it would grant to both governments and corporations over our spending habits — and indeed potentially over our ability to spend money at all.
3. The third apparent reason why Germany is such an idyll for the ATM arsonist is the decentralised nature of its banking and criminal justice system:
[U]nlike the Netherlands, which has only four banks, Germany has a more diverse sector, including hundreds of independent savings and loan banks. Moreover, each of the country’s 16 states also has its own police force, making coordination a challenge.
Achim Schmitz leads the central police unit focusing on ATM bombings in North-Rhine Westphalia, the first German state to be targeted a decade ago. Schmitz and his colleagues have arrested hundreds of suspects and won stiff prison sentences over the years, but that hasn’t gotten the attacks to stop.
“In 2015, we initially thought there was a ring of perpetrators and once we caught the core people, we would get rid of the problem,” said Schmitz. “We had to give up on that hypothesis a long, long time ago.”
Instead, Schmitz and his unit have witnessed a seemingly never-ending supply of young men trained to work in highly specialized teams, most of whom are Dutch nationals of Moroccan descent.
As these attacks have intensified, German authorities have struggled to prevent them, the Bloomberg piece notes. The government is now proposing to raise prison terms for the bombings to a minimum of two and a maximum of 15 years as well as expand police surveillance powers around the attacks — nine years after they became a regular occurrence. There has also been “grumbling within law enforcement about whether banks are doing enough to prevent this sort of crime.”
Yet even when measures are taken, the criminals always appear to be one step ahead…
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Nick Corbishley 