50 Interesting Facts about Banks and Bank Robberies

In 2016, a man tried to rob a bank after paying $500 to a wizard to make him invisible. Thinking no one could see him, he strolled into a bank in Tehran and started snatching money out of people’s hands.

27. Big banks don't process checks and debit card charges to your account in the order they are received, but instead, use a computer program that selects the biggest amounts first and charges them against your account; emptying your account faster and resulting in more overdraft fees (profit).

28. A 9-year-old boy robbed a New York bank in 1981 and got away with $118.

29. A man named Patrick Combs deposited a junk promotional check as a joke at his bank and they accepted it, depositing $95,093 into his account.

30. In 2016, a chemical engineering student named Christine Jiaxin Lee spent millions of dollars on handbags and luxury goods after a bank gave her the money by mistake. She obtained $4.6 million and spent the majority of it.

In 1916, a man named W. H. Coltharp mailed a building to Utah. He needed to build a bank, but his construction materials were 126 miles away. He packaged 80,000 bricks into boxes and mailed them. They got there, but the US postal service was not amused.

32. The day before the United States began bombing Baghdad, nearly US$1 billion was stolen from the Central Bank of Iraq. This is considered as one of the largest bank heists in history.

33. In July 2009, a man named Josh Muszyski from New Hampshire got charged $23 quadrillion by Bank of America and Visa due to a credit card glitch.

34. In 2003, a middle-aged pizza deliveryman named Brian Wells was forced to rob a bank with a remote-controlled bomb fastened to his neck. He was given a set of (useless) instructions to follow after he robbed the bank to disarm the bomb, but got caught by the police and was blown up by the conspirators.

35. During the runup to World War 2, Chase Bank made $500,000 by selling Reichsmarks stolen from Jews that fled Germany to Nazi sympathizers in the US.

An Italian bank named Credito Emiliano accepts Parmesan cheese as collateral for loans and keeps rows upon rows of 85-pound wheels of cheese stacked 33 feet high in a climate-controlled warehouse.

37. In 2008, a bank robber successfully used a Craigslist help-wanted section to recruit construction workers, specifying their uniform, to create unwitting decoys around a bank in Washington that he robbed in matching uniform. His "getaway vehicle" was an inner tube.

38. In 2011, Bank of America hired three intelligence firms to dismantle Wikileaks, instructed by the Department of Justice. Anonymous then proceeded to hack these intelligence firms in response.

39. In 2002, Boston orthopedist David Arndt, while performing complicated spinal surgery, walked out on his patient, who was lying on the operating table, anesthetized and sliced open, just so that he could go cash his paycheck before the bank closed.

40. In 2013, in Virginia's Fairfax County, a 26-year-old named Joshua Brady pretending to be a CIA agent convinced people to try to rob banks to test the security of Washington-area banks.

Dick Fuld, the former CEO of Lehman Brothers, got punched in the face and knocked out cold in the Lehman Brothers gym, the same night the bank announced its bankruptcy.

42. Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar had more illegal money than they could deposit in the banks, storing it in warehouses. He annually wrote off 10% of the stored money as ‘spoilage’ when rats crept in at night and nibbled on the hundred dollar bills.

43. An old man (made up name Carlos Hector Flomenbaum) gained the trust of ABN Amro bank in Antwerp's diamond district (Belgium) by bringing the workers chocolate. He was given VIP access to the bank vault and in 2007, stole $28 million worth of diamonds.

44. Carl Gugasian, dubbed the "Friday Night Bank Robber", was the most prolific bank robber in U.S. history. A doctoral student and a third-degree black belt, he robbed over 50 banks in a 30-year span and was known to be extremely meticulous in his methods.

45. Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, a Great Depression-era gangster and notorious bank robber, endeared himself to the public by destroying mortgage papers at the banks he robbed, freeing many from their debts.

A 20-year-old named Theodore J. Conrad obsessed with a movie about a heist stole $215,000 from the bank he worked for and disappeared. His whereabouts are still unknown.

47. At the age of 14, Tom Anderson (also known as MySpace Tom) cracked the security of Chase Manhattan Bank and caused one of the biggest FBI raids in California history, but wasn't arrested due to his young age.

48. Bank of America has been found to intentionally withdraw automatic mortgage payments past their due dates to collect thousands of dollars in interest.

49. Bank of America was formerly called Bank of Italy.

50. In the 1980s and 1990s, Japanese banks offered 100-year home loans, which would be passed through multiple generations.