Forget Brexit, ATM-Stealing Gangs Are Irish Border’s New Problem
Forget Brexit, ATM-Stealing Gangs Are Irish Border’s New Problem
(Bloomberg) -- At about 3 a.m. on April 1, a phone call from a local woman woke Northern Irish store owner Walter Millar. Thieves had rammed a Hitachi digger into his grocery store, lifted out an ATM, deposited it in a car and sped away into the night, the latest in a wave of raids across the region.
“I thought she was joking,” recalled Millar, 48, noting that the incident occurred on April Fools’ day. “But she was deadly serious.”
Many of the attacks have taken place in the border region, in the spotlight because of Britain’s tortuous departure from the European Union and the consequences for the Irish border. Indeed, the Irish prime minister and the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator on Monday vowed to find a solution as the divorce heads for another delay. Some locals, though, are more concerned at the moment with a string of attacks on cash machines.
Television news bulletins show images of diggers removing ATMs from stores and gasoline stations. About 10 have taken place this year, importing a technique from the rest of the U.K. involving gangs ram raiding, dismantling and blowing up cash machines.
The latest attack took place at the weekend, with three thieves in balaclavas using a digger to rip an ATM from a gas station wall in Derry, or Londonderry.
According to Millar at the store in the rural village of Ahoghill, the gang stole it from a building site and piloted it through the village, before targeting the shop. Tearing into the wall, they hoisted the ATM and set it down in the car that already had its roof ripped off in preparation. The digger was left in flames.
So far, police say there’s no evidence linking the attacks to terror gangs. Still, groups linked to dissidents opposed to the region’s peace process may be behind the attacks, the Irish Mirror reported Tuesday, adding as much as 700,000 euros ($790,000) has been stolen. The cash could be used to fund a new campaign after Brexit, the newspaper said.
The number of violent attacks on ATMs in the U.K. spiked to 342 in 2017 from 129 in 2014, according to ATM firm Cardtronics Plc, as gangs move away from riskier bank heists or cash-in-transit robberies. Dangerous attacks include ram raids and blowing up machines, by injecting them with flammable liquids.
Publicly, the banks say little about the raids. Privately, there’s a sense that not much can to be done given the history of the Irish border during the sectarian conflict that blighted Northern Ireland for decades.
The ATMs themselves usually have tracking devices and other anti-theft systems. Yet if they are traced to former strongholds of paramilitary activity around the border there’s not much chance of recovery. The region has been a hot bed of Republicanism for decades.
Almost two weeks on, Millar said he remains shaken.
“I was conscious that it could happen to us but you put it in the back of your mind, hoping it would never happen,” Millar said. “Then it did.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Rodney Edwards in London at redwards102@bloomberg.net;Peter Flanagan in Dublin at pflanagan23@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Chad Thomas at cthomas16@bloomberg.net, Dara Doyle, Rodney Jefferson
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.