Saw this title on Reddit and realized I don’t know the answer. I haven’t looked at the comments, so I still don’t know. The question makes sense to me though.
Wouldn’t it be better to transport cash in an unmarked vehicle to avoid detection?
What’s Cash?
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It’s an insurance requirement.
The vans are booby trapped to stain all the cash bright orange if robbed. I once saw an armed robbery at a tesco branch. They were obviously amateurs if they didn’t realise the cash would be spoiled.
I don’t think banks, or anyone else for that matter, can trust their staff not to tip off the muggers/robbers.
Whatever van you use to transport the cash, at some point that van will be leaving the Bank’s Cash Centre and at some point it will be arriving at a Bank branch and the boxes or bags of cash they are delivering and/or collecting will have to be transferred between the vehicle and the Bank premises.
It’s not easy to disguise a Bank Cash Run when you see packages being loaded /unloaded outside a Bank branch and it’s pretty obvious that it’s a Cash Run when the packages are being transferred from the banking hall into the secure area.
If a gang spent a few of weeks observing these movements and following the “nondescript vans” which they saw delivering or collecting packages from Bank branches, they could soon work out which “nondescript vans” to target.
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Sure. But they’d have to make at least some effort to target which van. The vehicle could be heavily reinforced with bullet proofing and all the rest like they do with the President’s vehicles, but they don’t need to advertise on the outside that it’s an armored vehicle like they normally do.
It’s only an issue when they are transporting gold.
Most security van robberies are pre-planned, aren’t they?
So the gang have to put in a bit of work beforehand to discover when and where is the best place to target a van for the best chance of a “good haul” and the best chance of getting away.
The Security Staff would still have to be given protective helmets, body armour etc or it would be too risky for them - so it would be obvious they were security officers, whatever van they were in.
I worked in banking for nearly 40 years.
In the old days, I remember times when Banks thought it was safe for Bank Staff to transport cash occasionally, thinking that robbers wouldn’t suspect an ordinary member of staff may be carrying a few thousand £££s in their shopping bag.
I used to work in a sub-branch, which was only open for 3 half-days a week. We used to go into the main branch first and gather what we needed, then two of us would take a taxi to the sub-branch, then return to the main branch by taxi when the sub-branch closed.
The sub-branch didn’t have a separate cash run and we only kept a small amount of cash there overnight, so we would always be carrying cash to and from the sub-branch in a nondescript shopping bag.
This used to happen at sub-branches all around the country until eventually, the robbers got wise. Fortunately, we never got held up but staff arriving at another sub-branch were and the Bank had to stop that practice.
Not only was it putting the lives of their staff at risk but it became an uninsurable risk.
I also worked at a bank for several years. Almost nothing they did made any sense to me. In some areas, they were lax with their security. In other areas, there were so many protocols.
After researching and studying why banks do what they do, it’s clear to me that they don’t make sense in so many ways.
this must have been many years ago! I worked in banking for a short time in the 80s and a longer time in the 90s & 00s, including for a while being involved in the finance side of FX wholesale deals & transportation of global currencies & tracking the data for all these Brinks and UPS vans going around the planet. We didn’t have any problems in the UK, it was usually somewhere like Africa that the vans were ambushed.
The brief period I spent in retail & mortgage lending in the late 80s I don’t remember this type of “cash in shopping bag” arrangement. Perhaps the manager put it in his briefcase next to his porn magazines without telling us!
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No, there was much more focus on security by the time the 1980s came along.
My sub-branch days were in the 1970s and such practices had been stopped by the end of the 1970s - although I can remember a few times in the very early 1980s when either us or the branch of another Bank in town would run short of Cash and phone each other to see if we could help one another out.
Officially we should have arranged a Securicor van to collect and deliver it but that incurred a high cost and it was only a two minute walk across the cobbles of our small market town, so we would sometimes make a sneaky unofficial trip to the other Bank to exchange a Bankers Payment for a bundle of cash.
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No, I completely disagree. Some little scrote somewhere would find out and then crash-n-grap would be simplicity itself against a non-armoured vehicle.
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