ATM Smash and Grabs are On the Rise – Are Your Stores Protected?
If you think needing to have your ATM touch screen repaired is your biggest problem, you haven’t been reading the news. This isn’t a scene out of Breaking Bad, it’s a story published just last Fall on the local news station in Atlanta: A truck and a van smashed into the glass entrance of an Atlanta mall. Men ran out and grabbed an ATM, loaded it into the van, and drove away. Later, police found both the van and the ATM abandoned nearby.
In 2010, Time Magazine called ATM theft the “recession’s hip crime.” Forget stealing ATM and credit cards, today’s low-tech criminals are going after the cash machine itself. Most ATM robberies happen in convenience stores, late at night, with robbers backing a truck up to the store front, smashing the windows, hooking a chain around the ATM and using the truck to pull it free – destroying pretty much anything in its path. You won’t only have to replace the ATM, you’ll need a lot of other repair work as well.
However, there are things you can do to decrease your store’s chance of being targeted. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health conducted a study of 460 convenience store robberies to find out what makes some stores a target, while others are left alone. Risk factors they found included: Poor visibility of the clerk and cash register from outside the store; lack of employee training in robbery prevention; lack of security systems; and isolated stores in close proximity to graffiti and multifamily housing. They recommend installing drop safes, and highly visible signs that drop safes are used; relocating the cashier area to allow the cashier visibility from outside the store; reducing window clutter that obstructs the view; and installing security systems.
Research shows that robbers choose their targets in advance – and that is even more true for ATM theft. Four guys in a pickup truck ramming into your store doesn’t happen on a whim; it takes premeditation! Putting obvious protection measures into place goes a long way towards preventing ATM smash-and-grabs, and eliminating all the collateral damage that comes with them.
