[Eduard]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Gelsenkirchen_heist

In December 2025, items worth an estimated €30 million were stolen from a Sparkasse bank in the Gelsenkirchen suburb of Buer, Germany. The thieves used a large drill to break into the bank's underground vault and proceeded to crack over 3,000 safe deposit boxes.

[nerdsniper]

Don’t need events that extreme. Regular branch banks have stuff go missing from the safety deposit boxes shockingly regularly. The locks aren’t particularly secure and various people are able to access them. It can be hard to find articles about them because they don’t make the news like the more remarkable incidents do. Examples of boring security box failures (but that were noteworthy in other ways so they did make the news): Jennifer Morsch, Roberta Glassman, Lianna Sarabekyan (multiple customers affected), Philip Poniz, Wells Fargo in Cape Coral FL, Wells Fargo Katy TX (many customers affected, blamed on road construction down the street), lots of individual stories where banks just totally stopped following their own procedures on ID checking and logging.

The vast majority of these don’t make the news because there’s no proof there was even anything inside the box in the first place so anyone could be lying.

> Mr. Pluard, who tracks legal filings and news reports, estimates that around 33,000 boxes a year are harmed by accidents, natural disasters and thefts.

> Oddly, the bank returned to him five watches that weren’t his. “They were the wrong color, the wrong size — totally different than what I had,” Mr. Poniz said. “I had no idea where they came from.”

https://archive.is/j8e6x

[Stratoscope]

> Regular branch banks have stuff go missing from the safety deposit boxes shockingly regularly. The locks aren’t particularly secure and various people are able to access them.

My late wife had a safe deposit box in the Almaden Valley (San Jose) branch of US Bank. Her key to the box was nowhere to be found. So I had to get the box drilled open.

This would normally require a hefty fee. But the branch was moving to a new location, so they invited customers to make an appointment to show up a Saturday with proper ID for a lock drilling party.

I showed my ID and the death certificate, and we went into the safe to have the lock drilled.

But there was no real drilling involved. The locksmith had a little handheld gadget that she pushed into the lock, gave it a little twist, and the door came right open.

The ironic part? All that was in there were a few pieces of costume jewelry, worth maybe $50 in total.

She was paying more than that per year for the box rental, and if I'd had to pay for the "drilling" it would probably be more than that.

[rationalist]

I was with my mother when she went to close her safe deposit box. Her key did not work, so after checking her ID (could be fake), they used a tool that very quickly removed the lock. We were then left alone in the camera-less room with all of the other boxes and the tool...