The biggest robberies in history
Armed robbery of Dunbar
The largest cash robbery that occurred in the U.S. was $ 18.9 million. This robbery took place in 1997 inside Dunbar Armored. It was organized by Allen Pace who worked for this company as a regional security inspector. With five friends, he outwitted the guards and stole this huge sum of money. A police investigation soon established that it was the actions of employees, but they were unable to find any evidence of the perpetrator. Pace and the others were caught when one of the participants in the robbery made the payment with a bundle of money with the original tape from the firm.
Big train robbery
The theft of £ 2.6 million may not sound like much today, but in 1963 it was a huge sum of money that thieves stole from a mail bag on a Royal Mail train in England. The robbers were armed only with a metal bar, and their robbery went down in British history as one of the greatest. Most of the members were arrested and imprisoned, but organizers Ronnie Biggs and Charles Wilson managed to escape.
Ferdinand Marcos
The former president of the Philippines was a greedy man. He is believed to have stolen between $ 5 billion and $ 10 billion through government loans, bribery, embezzlement, takeovers of private companies and outright theft. The stolen money was paid into accounts in foreign banks and invested in real estate in the United States. Marcos' government was overthrown by mass protests and he died in exile in Hawaii in 1989. Authorities have so far managed to recover just over $ 4 billion in stolen property.
Sani Abacha
By his death in 1998, General Sani Abacha had stolen between $ 3 billion and $ 5 billion during his five-year rule of Nigeria. He got the money by buying cheap bonds, but also by simply taking money from the Central Bank for “national security projects”. Nigerian officials have managed to recoup a smaller portion of the money through legal battles, but most of the money is still missing.
Jean Claude Duvalier
The former president of Haiti could also be at the top of the list given how much money he stole from this small and poor country. “It is assumed that Duvalier stole about 1.7-4.5% of GDP per year during his rule,” they say from the World Bank. The search for money is still ongoing, more than 30 years after he lost power.
Saddam Hussein
The Iraqi dictator took the money in the easiest way - he asked for it. Hussein sent his son and personal assistant a handwritten message to the head of the bank asking him to hand him $ 920 million and € 90 million. It was probably difficult to deny this request.
Bonds in the UK
At 9:30 a.m. on May 2, 1990, John Goddard was walking down a London street when a knife-robbed robber stole his briefcase. This act of robbery brought the robber £ 292 million in bonds, but he did not enjoy the stolen money for long. He was found dead a little later.
Aleksandr Andreevich Panin
This Russian cyber-thief has programmed malicious software called SpyEye which has infected more than 1.4 million computers. The software collected bank account information, credit card numbers and passwords. "Panin commercialized the trade of stolen financial and personal data"; said one U.S. official. How much money was stolen, no one really knows. It is estimated that hundreds of billions are involved.
Bernie Madoff
Madoff has deceived investors for more than $ 65 billion, making most people on this list amateurs. He used the so-called Ponzi scheme - he assured people that he could bring them big profits and new investors with the money they give him, and he used their money to pay off previous investors all the time by taking part of that money to himself. When investors began to demand their money back, the whole structure of his scam collapsed. He was sentenced to 150 years in prison.
Jérôme Kerviel
Kerviel made risky bets on European stocks and lost. He made a fake system to cover up his losses, but it was discovered in 2008. French bank Société Générale reported losses of € 4.9 billion. His lawyers said Kerviel was a victim of a greedy system, but was sentenced to three years in prison. He was recently released.
Siemens
One of the world's largest companies was also one of the most corrupt. German electronics company Siemens has paid hundreds of millions of euros in bribes in dozens of countries. “Bribery was the standard way Siemens operated,” U.S. officials said. "They used a proven method of cash-filled suitcases." Siemens has paid the largest fines to date for bribery in the US and Germany.
