Somebody Took Our ATM!

A new ATM problem has been reported in several communities in Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Someone has been taking the ATMs. Not just taking ATMs, as in stealing from them...they are actually taking the ATMs!

These machines, which weigh about 600 pounds, are being hauled away from the convenience and grocery stores where they had been installed. The theft has become so common that one man was arrested in a store in one town in New Hampshire trying to steal a machine at the same moment an alarm was going off at a nearby grocery store in the same town where someone was trying to steal another one!

After breaking the machines open and emptying the contents, the thieves are dumping some of the ruined $40,000 machines in the river. The police refused to allow a picture of one such recovered machine, according to a reporter on the New Hampshire Eagle Tribune, because "...it would show just how flimsy they are made and how easy they are to get into."

Copyright © 1991 Bankers' Hotline. Originally appeared in Bankers' Hotline, Vol. 2, No. 5, 6/91