Not real Art Thieves

The CBC has an article with an interview with a founding director of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art.

"Against popular conception there is no such thing as a cliché or full-time art thief," said Charney in an interview with CBC cultural affairs show Q on Thursday.

"There are only thieves who have stolen art and sometimes more than once. Sometimes organized crime syndicates will hire thieves who are low on the totem pole to steal art."

Why so may European Art Thefts?

Slate has an article about why art theft is so much more common in Europe than in North America. The short answer is weaker security and more art.

Fake Guards

Following on to our earlier article about fake trucks, the Washington Post has an article about a criminal who dressed up as a security guard and walked out of a bank with $100,000 in cash.

About an hour after the robbery, the genuine Brinks guard arrived at the bank branch and was told that another guard had completed the day's cash pickup.

Only after returning to his office did the Brinks driver tell his supervisors that he did not make a pickup at the Wachovia branch, police said. Brinks officials contacted the bank, and a branch manager called D.C. police about 8 p.m., almost 11 hours after the theft.

The technique isn't always effective though, SFGate has an article about another thief who tried the same thing and got caught (with $640,000) before the could leave a Brinks facility.

Cloned Trucks

Computer security expert Bruce Schneier has an article about how criminals are creating trucks with fake logos and paint schemes to get by security guards.

Gang convicted for UK's largest robbery

Yahoo News has an article about the verdicts for the gang that committed the UK's largest robbery. The men stole 53 million pounds from an armoured car depot in February 2006 but were soon arrested.

The robbers, some dressed as policemen and most wearing prosthetic disguises, snatched the record haul after getting past tight security by kidnapping the depot's manager, his wife and son at gunpoint.

They were also helped by an "inside man", who not only provided details of the building's interior layout and security protocols, but also secretly filmed it using a tiny camera hidden on his belt.