A good heist movie has a team of experts assembled by a mastermind, who has been working for months to break into a ridiculously secured vault. They'll have to bypass motion sensors, heat sensors, cameras and go on a mission with impossible odds to steal hundreds of millions of dollars.
In reality, heists are sometimes exactly like that. In fact, some of the biggest heists in history are so outlandish and mind-bogglingly complicated, you would probably call them unrealistic if you saw them on the big screen. These are the greatest heists that changed the face of the world. Take a look.
The Graff Diamonds robbery took place on 6 August 2009 when two men posing as customers entered the premises of Graff Diamonds in New Bond Street, London and stole jewellery worth nearly ?40 million (US$65 million).
It was believed to be the largest ever gems heist in Britain at the time, and the second-largest British robbery after the ?53 million raid on a Securitas depot in Kent in 2006. The thieves' haul totalled 43 items of jewellery, consisting of rings, bracelets, necklaces and wristwatches. One necklace alone has been reported as being worth more than ?3.5m.
Of all the modern heists on this list, the Antwerp diamond heist of 2003 may be the one that most closely resembles the plot of a Hollywood thriller.
The Antwerp diamond heist, dubbed the "heist of the century" in 2003,? was the largest diamond heist of all time. Since then, the heist was classified to be one of the largest robberies in history. Thieves stole loose diamonds, gold, silver and other types of jewellery valued at more than $100 million.
The vault was thought to be impenetrable. It was protected by 10 layers of security, including infrared heat detectors, Doppler radar, a magnetic field, a seismic sensor, and a lock with 100 million possible combinations. The robbery was called the heist of the century, and even now the police can't explain exactly how it was done.
The thieves called it the train, the papers called it the Great Train Robbery, and the police called it the crime of the century. In 1963, a multimillion-dollar heist changed the history of England forever. The podcast on Luminary by British Villains tells the story that's never been told before.?
The robbers stole the Queen¡¯s train and its contents which were in a turn of events followed by the prison breaks, botched up plastic surgeries and even international kidnappings. Not to forget, the extremely hefty price robbers had to pay - getting away with the heist every single day again and again for the rest of their lives.
The London raid in 2000 is one of history¡¯s greatest robbers. A rare diamond worth $ 529 million was targeted to be stolen from the dome. All the members of the gang were caught by the police and handed them off with their unusual movements in the De Beers diamond exhibit. If they were not caught, they were planning to replace the fake diamonds with their originals.
Eccentric art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner had only the noblest intentions when she opened her magnificent Boston home to the public in order to display her impressive art collection.
Gardner¡¯s collection was made up of masterpieces from the likes of Rembrandt and Vermeer, and it was assembled after a lifetime of travel. That¡¯s why it was all the more devastating when, on the night of March 18, 1990, two men posing as police officers forced their way into the museum and made off with over $500 million worth of the world¡¯s finest paintings and drawings.
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist remains the largest private property theft in American history ¡ª and featured the largest bounty ever offered by a private institution.
The heist was largely orchestrated by an employee of the German Lufthansa airline with a severe gambling problem, along with his colleague and some aides. They had long been planning to steal millions in unmarked banknotes from one of Lufthansa¡¯s regular shipments of cash.
One of the aides went off to the Lufthansa cargo terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport in the early hours of Dec. 11, 1978. In just over an hour, the crew took six employees hostage and stole nearly $6 million in untraceable cash and jewellery ¡ª with a combined value of roughly $23.4 million today.
The heist had gone off perfectly, but the plot came undone when their getaway driver, Edward ¡°Stacks¡± Parnell, messed up. Rather than taking the Ford Econoline van they used in the heist to a mob-owned scrapyard in New Jersey, Parnell left it parked in front of his girlfriend¡¯s house in Canarsie, Brooklyn.
Also known as ¡°Gribodemon¡± and ¡°Harderman,¡± this Russian cyber thief was responsible for malicious software known as ¡°SpyEye,¡± which infected more than 1.4 million computers and collected bank accounts, credit card numbers and passwords. ¡°He commercialized the wholesale theft of financial and personal information,¡± said a US official. How much was stolen as a result? No one really knows, but estimates run into the hundreds of billions.
In 2011, subsidiaries of Shell and ENI paid US$1.1 billion to the Nigerian government for an offshore block with estimated oil reserves of 9 billion barrels. The government transferred exactly the same amount to an account earmarked for Malabu Oil & Gas, an anonymous shell company whose hidden owner was Dan Etete.
Etete then secretly awarded the oil block to himself while he was Nigeria¡¯s petroleum minister in 1998. After years of legal battles, the oil block was taken from Malabu Oil & Gas and awarded to Shell and ENI, who then paid the money to the Nigerian government, allegedly with the knowledge that it would be forwarded to Etete¡¯s company.
Danish krona between 60 and 62 million, in other words, $ 9.7 million, was stolen from Dansk V?rdih?ndtering, a security firm in Brondby. The heavy-armed gang of 16 men shot at the streets during the robbery. At least 10 garbage trucks prevented the police from accessing the area. Five members of the gang were caught in a hotel in Copenhagen a few days later.
The Dunbar Armored robbery is the largest cash robbery to have occurred in the United States. On September 12, 1997, six men robbed the Dunbar Armored facility on Mateo St. in Downtown Los Angeles, California of US$18.9 million.
The robbery was orchestrated by Allen Pace III, of Compton, with childhood friends Erik Damon Boyd, of Buena Park, Eugene Lamar Hill Jr., of Bellflower, Freddie Lynn McCrary Jr., of Arleta, Terry Wayne Brown Sr., of Los Angeles, and Thomas Lee Johnson, of Las Vegas, Nevada. While the group left almost no evidence, Hill was implicated two years later when he accidentally gave a real estate broker a stack of cash bound with the original currency straps; the broker contacted the police.?
Vincenzo Peruggia was an Italian museum worker, artist, and thief, most famous for stealing the Mona Lisa on 21 August 1911.In 1911, Peruggia perpetrated what has been described as the greatest art theft of the 20th century.
According to Peruggia's interrogation in Florence after his arrest, he entered the museum on Monday, 21 August around 7 am, through the door where the other Louvre workers were entering. He said he wore one of the white smocks that museum employees customarily wore and was indistinguishable from the other workers.
When the Salon Carr¨¦, where the Mona Lisa hung, was empty, he lifted the painting off the four iron pegs that secured it to the wall and took it, and left the Louvre through the same door he had entered.? ??
D. B. Cooper is a media epithet used to refer to an unidentified man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft in United States airspace between Portland and Seattle on the afternoon of November 24, 1971.[1][2] He extorted $200,000 in ransom (equivalent to $1,278,000 in 2020) and parachuted to an uncertain fate over southwestern Washington. The man purchased his airline ticket using the alias Dan Cooper but, because of a news miscommunication, became known in popular lore as D. B. Cooper.
This Bank of Kerala heist took its inspiration from the Bollywood film ¡°Dhoom.¡± In the movie, robbers dig a hole through the floor of a bank, making off millions in loot. This $1.35 million heist was led by Vaniyam Purakkal Joseph, known by the alias ¡°Babu,¡± who rented the vacant restaurant storefront beneath the Bank of Kerala office and pretended to be renovating the space in 2007. Over a long holiday weekend, the team cracked through the floor of the bank¡¯s strong room and used glass-cutting tools to open the iron safes.??
Now known colloquially as the ¡°Nigerian Prince Scammers¡± or the ¡°419 Scammers,¡± this worldwide gang of fraudsters crafted increasingly credible-sounding and well-informed emails to coerce the recipients into forking over cash via wire transfer, check, or loaded gift cards.
The thieves used a variety of techniques, including inventing romantic relationships with their targets, convincing their victims to receive and ship packages or return merchandise, requesting their contacts to deposit fraudulent checks and other crafty ideas from 2001-2018.
Six Nigerian nationals of a particularly egregious gang of 20 fraudsters were finally extradited to Gulfport, Mississippi, in early 2018, where they awaited trial for international wire fraud.??
The Agricultural Bank of China robbery was the embezzlement of nearly 51 million yuan from the Handan branch of the Agricultural Bank of China in Hebei province between March 16 and April 14, 2007. Perpetrated by two vault managers employed at the branch, it is the largest bank robbery in China's history.??
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