In January 2009, a figure wrapped up too tightly in a hoodie to be identified walked into a bank and handed the teller a note demanding cash. The teller handed the money over, the figure walked outside and left with another figure, a lookout, who was also impossible to ID. That doesn't sound like a "crazy robbery" until you learn that the suspects are believed to be girls, aged 14 and 12.
Just goes to show you that it's never too early to start pursuing your dreams. At an age, most girls would be happy stealing a necklace at Claire's, but these two were already knocking over banks! They weren't caught—even the marked bills didn't help. Unless the 12-year-old grew up to try this 2014 heist, they never caught either of the kids.
In 2008, a restaurant went under construction in a high-rise building in Kerala. They put up a "Coming Soon" sign and began construction—except that "construction" turned out to mean "drilling an enormous hole in the ceiling that leads into the bank vault above."
Over a long holiday weekend, the robbers tunneled into the bank and made off with 2.5 million rupees and 160 pounds of gold in a plot they got from watching a Bollywood film. Despite the fact that they were all caught, someone else tried the same thing again this year. Maybe India's banks just need to shell out for ground-level offices.
In 2001, Argentina had a financial crisis that scared a ton of their citizens into trusting safety deposit boxes over bank accounts. When you combine that with Argentina's massive network of underground tunnels, you've got a recipe for some cartoon-style capers.
In 2006, a group of robbers started perhaps the friendliest hostage situation in history, singing "happy birthday" to captives, letting them talk on the phone, and even trading them liberally for pizza. In hour seven, police finally stormed the place to find that the robbers had made a completely clean getaway by taking those tunnels to a waiting boat.
Something about Washington seems to inspire aquatic getaways, but some are more successful than others. Perhaps after a Bond binge, one aspiring criminal decided to take to the seas after robbing a bank in Olympia.
He led police on a car chase, crashed, and then ran through the woods lugging both his scuba gear and a backpack full of cash. Over-encumbered, the police tackled him before he ever reached the water.
"Crime family" is usually just an expression, unless you're an aficionado of Batman villains. But in the case of the Catt family, it was bizarrely literal. Scott Catt was an engineer who struggled with alcohol after becoming a widower. He moved in with his mother and started staging an annual bank robbery to help make ends meet.
Emboldened by success, he moved to Texas and brought his kids in on the act in 2012, stealing $70,000 with the help of Hayden and Abby Scott. From there, they got sloppy. They grabbed $30,000 from their next heist but were ruined by security footage from when they were casing the place. They had come in disguised as construction workers, and the police thought that their safety vests were suspiciously clean.
One morning in 2008, 12 men responding to a Craigslist ad, gathered in a Bank of America parking lot. They were told to come prepared for road work and dressed in the blue work shirts and yellow vests they would need for the job.
Then one of the men broke ranks, sprayed a cash-carrying guard with pepper spray, and fled towards the river to take an inner tube down the Skykomish and escape while the would-be road-workers unwittingly masked his getaway (Thomas Crown-style). It would've been perfect, but he was turned in by a homeless man who spotted him—not during the actual crime, but while rehearsing for it two weeks prior. Now out of prison, he writes children's books.
In 2008, Maria Garcia of McAllen, Texas was in a tight spot and looking at several ways to get out of it—some more legitimate than others. The responsible approach was the food stamp application she had filled out. The less-responsible approach was the bank robbery.
Unfortunately for her, she got her wires crossed and handed the teller a robbery note written on the back of the completed food stamp application, which had her name and address written out in full. It wasn't hard to track her down after that. The same year, a Florida man was arrested in a similar incident after robbing two banks with notes written on the back of personal checks.
Huy Trong Luong of Jersey City went on a massive crime spree, all while wearing the same black wig, Dolce & Gabbana hat, and black women's jacket. The outfit is the least notable part of the case.
Over the course of just five months, Luong knocked over nine banks, making death threats with a fake bomb made out of roman candles with the fuses tied together.
Rip Torn is a beloved comedic actor known for playing severe, stentorian authority figures in works like The Larry Sanders Show, Men in Black, and 30 Rock. He's also been in numerous incidents with the police over his alcohol abuse.
These usually amount to drunk driving—dangerous enough on its own—but in 2010, police arrived to find the 78-year-old actor highly intoxicated, in a bank, waving around a loaded revolver, having apparently broken in through a back window. Usually when a celebrity wants something they can just play the "Don't you know who I am?" card, so it's unclear why Torn felt the need to rob a bank.
This past September, two men entered an Indianapolis bank with handguns, took an undisclosed sum of money, and fled. Local news reports were fairly dry, but the Internet was quick to pick up on the thieves disguises as Youngblood Priest (from Superfly) and Rick James (from real life, sort of) and out came the Dave Chappelle quotes.
If the two have been caught, it hasn't made the news yet, but since some of these cases cleared up years later, it's never too late.
You'd think the police would be the ones trying to stop bank robberies, but that wasn't the case with South African police officer Andre Stander. Instead, he was the one doing the robbing.
Stander would spend his lunch breaks robbing banks in disguise, only to return later in the afternoon to investigate the crimes in his role as a police officer. Amazingly, he managed to pull this off 30 times before he was eventually caught.
A group of criminals in Brazil realized that robbing a bank the old fashioned way was too risky. So, instead of walking through the front doors and demanding the money, they tunnelled their way in without anyone noticing. The group planned to rob Banco Central in Brazil, and they kicked things off by renting a building a few hundred feet from the bank's location.
Then the digging began. To help keep their neighbors from getting suspicious, they made it look like the were running a landscaping company--a business where there's nothing unusual about hauling out large quantities of dirt. They eventually dug a tunnel 656 feet long and managed to sucessfully rob the bank. The crime took place over the weekend, and no one even noticed until Monday morning.
The Stopwatch Gang was a group of Canadians who managed to rob 140 banks before they were eventually caught. Their "success" was thanks to two things that you typically don't see in most robberies--politeness and meticulous planning.
They had their methods down to a T and could allegedly rob a bank in two minutes or less. This, coupled with the fact that one of the men was always seen wearing a stopwatch, eventually led the FBI to dub them "The Stopwatch Gang."
Santa Claus is coming to town, so hide your valuables! This time, he's not here to give; he's here to take. Or at least that was the case in Cisco, TX in 1927.
During this iconic Texas heist, Marshall Ratliff, who was dressed as Santa, led three other men down the streets of town and into the bank, where they successfully robbed it. After a shootout with police, the group led officers on the biggest manhunt in Texas history.
On the morning of July 12, 2007, employees of the Dar Es Salaam Bank in Baghdad came to work to find the bank's vault wide open and completely empty. Almost $300 million dollars was missing. The exact details of what happened and who did it are a still a mystery, but here's what police think happened.
It's believed that two or three men responsible for the robbery had been hired as guards for the bank. They used these positions to access the vault without too much trouble and then were assisted by local militias in fleeing the city. However, we may never know what really happend in this bizarre and expensive case.
