People just won’t stop blowing up ATMs

David Earl Ammons pulled up to a bank in Edisto Island, South Carolina, just after 9 a.m. on Christmas Day 2021. 

He wanted cash from the ATM, but he wasn’t trying to get it by entering his PIN.

Ammons, who was wearing a hooded camo jacket and a long black wig and carrying a pink bag adorned with flowers, walked around the bank. Then he placed a pipe bomb near its ATM before sprinting away as smoke started billowing.

About 40 seconds later the bomb exploded. It blew open the door to the building housing the ATM, and Ammons walked in. But it failed to break open the ATM. He left the scene empty-handed and frustrated, and was arrested a month later. Here’s a video of the bombing, obtained by the Post and Courier in Charleston:

Ammons pleaded guilty to second-degree burglary and using a bomb and was given 10 years in prison for each charge, which would run concurrently.

While Ammons’ attempt to blow up an ATM failed, others haven’t. In Decatur, Georgia, Abdurrahim Jalal, a landscaper, has been charged with stealing $88,000 from a Bank of America ATM in March of last year. His lawyers are appealing the case on the grounds that the evidence used against him was incorrectly gathered. Last week, a man was arrested and charged with trying to blow up two ATMs in San Diego.

Bank robbery has been around as long as banks themselves. But more and more — and especially in Europe — people are trying to blow up ATMs to scoop up cash. The European Association for Secure Transactions has tracked the increasing number of ATM bombings. According to its data, attacks on cash points rose 24% between 2022 and 2023, with estimated total losses of about $10 million.

Experts who spoke with Sherwood said the ATM bombings have been increasing in frequency partly because during the pandemic, people figured out they could get away with the attacks when nobody was looking.

Physical attacks on ATMs tend to come in two forms. One is where criminals tear out machines using chains or ropes attached to a vehicle, put the entire machine in the back of that vehicle — often a pickup truck — and drive away with it. The ATM is then cracked open at a safe location away from the eyes of law enforcement, and the cash inside is extracted. The other form, which accounts for 61% of losses reported to EAST, is when an explosive device destroys the machine and allows immediate access to the cash.

Across the 19 jurisdictions tracked by EAST, two ATMs are blown up every day.

The rise in incidents, now at their highest level in the past five years, has worried those in the industry. “Explosive attacks are an increasing concern across Europe,” EAST executive director Lachlan Gunn said. “And they seem to be more prevalent in some countries than others.”

Most of the attacks in Europe are concentrated in Germany, according to EAST data — a consequence of the way the German financial and banking system is set up, Gunn said. Unlike many countries in Europe where there’s a centralized banking system, Germany has a fragmented network with different banks covering different states. Often those banks don’t talk to each other, which means it’s possible for incidents to take place without other bank companies being aware. That’s especially important when the problem is a connected wave of criminal activity.

Until recently, the Netherlands held the unenviable title of the most-bombed country in Europe. “The attack that was getting quite prevalent in the Netherlands was very simple,” Gunn said. “It was down to just a couple of people on a scooter, who would approach an ATM in the small hours, put the explosive in — boom! — get what’s available, and scoot off. We’re not talking big groups of people here.”

Criminal gangs in the Netherlands managed to fine-tune their techniques, but as the government worked to mitigate bombings by centralizing its bank system to share intelligence quicker, attackers have now migrated eastward to Germany. “Dutch criminals perfected this type of attack,” Gunn said. “And as the Netherlands has hardened up significantly, they're looking at other markets for their operations.”

To tackle the issue, Germany is planning to toughen up sentences for those caught bombing ATMs, according to the country’s interior minister. The German federal government said in July that bombings had reached record levels.

Europe’s problems haven’t gone unnoticed abroad, either. David Tente, executive director for the US and Latin America at the ATM Industry Association, which represents 5,000 members across 65 countries, said, “There is an increase that we're seeing in the frequency of the attacks in Europe and elsewhere.”

Elsewhere includes the US, which has the same fragmented banking system that allows criminals to crack open multiple ATMs without a scare running through the entire industry. The US is also slightly behind other countries when it comes to card or contactless payments, though it has been catching up, which means ATMs are a more attractive target for criminals. 16% of all payments are made using cash in the US, the Federal Reserve reported, marginally higher than the 14% in the UK recorded by UK Finance, an industry body. And because the US is a slightly more cash-based society, the payoff from an ATM is likely to be larger.

The US has proportionally fewer bomb attacks on ATMs than Europe. Though the EU has a population roughly one-third higher than the US, its 714 bombing attacks in 2023 are far greater than the 37 incidents recorded by the FBI in 2022 (the latest year with data available) in which an “explosive device was used or threatened” at a bank. The FBI doesn’t break down how many ATMs were attacked specifically with bombs, but its total number of ATM attacks — 138 in 2022 — is also far lower proportionally than the 4,637 recorded by EAST in 2023.

With the average American bank ATM holding between $50,000 and $200,000, and even in-store or gas-station machines stocked with $2,000 to $10,000, a successful attack can result in a considerable payout for a criminal. 

“Cash is still king,” Gunn said. “And obviously ATMs are essentially boxes full of cash.” The comparative lack of traceability for cash versus stolen-card payments also makes it an attractive target. While a stolen card can be quickly tracked and provide a virtually real-time log of where someone is making payments, purchases with cash take longer to leave a trail and are harder to track: you have to wait until an end-of-day stock take and then manually check reference numbers on individual banknotes to see if they tally with those taken from a bombed ATM. Doing so can take days, by which point much of the money will have been either spent or laundered into fresh notes.

The number of incidents rose during the pandemic, Tente said, as people struggled to make ends meet and recognized that banks were understaffed. “We had very few explosive attacks in the US until the pandemic, and then all of a sudden we saw people improvising, making their own explosives,” he said. “Those who do it see it as a simple, direct way. They don’t really care about the collateral damage that happens.”

ATM manufacturers including NCR are constantly working with banks to limit such attacks. In July 2020, as ATM attacks were on the rise, NCR published a white paper outlining its countermeasures to such attacks, including locating machines away from public highways that make them easier to bomb, and a “gas protection system” that would detect and neutralize the butane or oxyacetylene used in some bombings. The system releases carbon dioxide to prevent any explosive gases pumped into the ATM from working. Other features that NCR offers include ATM body armor, which reportedly has a 100% success rate against physical attacks.

But the main way countries on top of ATM attacks have helped snuff them out is by making the cash criminals obtain worthless once they’ve cracked open the machine. So-called intelligence banknote neutralization systems (IBNS) were the best countermeasure to quell attacks in the Netherlands, and could nip attacks elsewhere in the bud. 

“It’s a system that you put on the ATM or inside the ATM, and if the ATM gets blown up, the system goes off and the ink stains all the currency,” Tente said. “That makes it useless to the criminals because generally the notes are stained enough that they can't get reimbursed for that currency.”

Yet even that isn’t perfect, Gunn said. “An ink-stained note still has a value in the world, and that can be up to 30 or 40% of the face value,” he said. That’s why the Netherlands tends to use glue for its IBNS countermeasures: a solid brick of banknotes is totally unusable.

Above all, one of the best strategies to stop people from blowing up ATMs is to make the punishment strong enough that they’re dissuaded from doing so in the first place. Ammons’ 10-year sentence in South Carolina is a pretty severe deterrent, and is one that other countries are following. 

“The UK is pretty good,” Gunn said. “We link explosions to terrorist-type attacks, so if you get banged up, you're going away for a long time.” That compares favorably to other European countries, he said — and goes some way to explaining why Europe is the global hotbed of such attacks. “There, you can be out in a month.”

Chris Stokel-Walker is a UK-based journalist. His latest book is How AI Ate the World.