Editorial: Criminal getaways - minus the balaclavas and car chases

Bruce Willis in Die Hard. Cellphones and cards have changed the world, including in banking and in the types of crime now being committed.

Editorial

Those thriller movie staples - the bank heist, balaclava-wearing goons, heart-pumping getaway drives, wheel-squealing near-misses and police chase prangs - might soon be relegated to period pieces.

And film directors will have to keep finding inventive ways of making a guy staring at a screen seem tense instead.

AP reports that in Denmark, no bank heists were recorded at all in 2022.

Because cashless transactions have become so common, not just bank heists, but physical banks themselves have been disappearing, and even the targeting of ATMs is down.

The number of bank branches in Denmark dropped from 219 in 1991 to 56 in 2021, while from 221 bank robberies in 2000, there was one in 2021 and none last year.

Cashless-ness got a boost during the pandemic as a way to reduce contact, but lack of notes and coins is a problem for the poor and homeless, buskers, and people doing side jobs to make a bit extra. Businesses are shifting customers to email and online contact rather than postal and in-person contact. Public transport cards are losing out to credit card swipes.

It’s important that physical currency remains an option. Coins in particular have a great, ancient history going back to the Iron Age, and have carried images of Greek gods and Roman emperors.

Criminals are adapting to the times, exploiting easier targets.

Smash-and-grab robberies and ram-raids of small businesses for cash and goods that can be passed on have been a major youth crime problem here in the past year.

Adult criminals have increasingly gone online to scam people of billions, as cards, laptops, and smartphones are increasingly used to pay for everything.

That other movie cliché, the ‘have you got the money?’ cash-in-a-case handover scene, is going to be as dated as the landlines and payphones in the early Die Hard series.