How Do You Rob an ATM? You Blow It Up

In an increasingly digital society, an underground assemblage of thieves in the Netherlands has kept alive the art of violently stealing large sums of cold, hard cash.

- By TOM LAMONT

In the predawn hours on August 8, 2020, three young men from the Netherlands drove over the Dutch-German border to a sleepy branch of Sparkasse, the largest network of public savings banks in Germany. The branch occupied the ground floor of a brown-brick building in a village called Wachtendonk, serving the local community with a cash machine that was, that morning, filled with at least 160,000 euros. The men from the Netherlands, each around 20 years old at the time, were part of a gang whose members had taught themselves how to rob exactly this sort of isolated, rural, money-stuffed ATM. Tending to drive out of their home country after dark, equipped with jerricans full of gasoline for their return trip and the repackaged powder from fireworks, they were one of many Dutch gangs that crisscrossed mainland Europe, arming, detonating and emptying ATMs. In the Netherlands this type of crime has become known as a plofkraak, to suggest an evolved form of safecracking, as well as the sound—“plof!”—that results when an ATM has its vault bombed open, scattering singed plastic into the sky.

A gang member nicknamed Yamaha took the lead on the Wachtendonk job, helped by an associate with the nickname Jager. One of the gang's most reliable methods at the time was to crowbar open the front of an ATM. They would have at the ready a metal rod, shaped a little like a pizza chef's slider, but fitted at its wider end with taped packs of powdered explosives. Some of these bomb packs were made at home by the gang leader's girlfriend. With the machine pried open, a practised plofkraker would know to jam their slider into the aperture. Package positioned, they would then retreat to a safe distance, unfurling the ignition cable attached to the package to trigger a blast, blowing up the ATM from the inside out.