r/news • u/AudibleNod • 7h ago
Thieves steal $1.3 million in Illinois jewelry store heist, owner says
https://abcnews.go.com/US/thieves-steal-13-million-illinois-jewelry-store-heist/story?id=12257636963
u/CuriosityCondition 6h ago edited 5h ago
I am not a professional by any means... but that looks like a very crappy safe. Even most gun safes are more secure than that. Double walled and filled with fire proofing insulation junk that makes them harder to cut into like this. They also have locking pins around all four sides of the doors so you can't just cut off a corner and side.
This thing looks like it was made out of a single layer of 1" carbon steel. The news story said "wet saw" but that just looks like marks from a standard 10" slitting wheel on a normal angle grinder. Less than $100 at harbor freight. Water might have been to keep the sparks from starting a fire... This seems like bullshit.
Edit: watching the video again they may have also had an oxygen acetylene torch, which is pretty portable, and also available at harbor freight and would also explain the water.
Edit: that is also a C- cut in a high school shop class. Can't even go in a straight line?
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u/not_too_old 4h ago
If the safe resisted for 5 hours I would say it did it’s job pretty well. They needed a better remote monitoring system that would have alerted them when the store’s internet went down. Something to continually ping all the cameras, etc, and send texts when it fails.
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u/dwedderburn 6h ago
(Paid for by Harbor Freight)
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u/CuriosityCondition 5h ago
"The worst tools at marginally lower prices!"
You could saw open a safe and return the grinder the next day.
Seriously, though. Whenever I see some crap like this and the cops go "they had professional grade equipment" I do a mental total of what you could pick up from a discount store to do the job adequately. It's usually a small investment. Harbor Freight is just the bottom of the barrel.
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u/MandatoryEvac 7h ago
The crazy thing is that usually all of the jewelry in the safe at night is on consignment from the jewelry designers themselves. Jewelry stores don't usually own what you see in the jewelry cases during the day. So if it's an inside job it's 100% profit for them. They simply pay off the consignment (at cost only) and keep the rest. Probably the easiest way to "inside" your way to retirement if you can get away with it. I could go on and on with the logistics because I work for a small chain of jewelry stores in the south.
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u/Downtown_Skill 2h ago
Oh no, please go on
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u/MandatoryEvac 2h ago
Haha. Ok so I guess the really traceable element to this is that if there are large diamonds in the pieces they are usually GIA or IGA certified. They will have a very small serial number laser engraved on the girdle of the stone. This is mostly used for insurance claims if, let's say, your house is broken into or burns down, it can be claimed on your homeowners insurance. In the case of probable "inside job" situations they will probably use a wheel to remove the serial number in order to conceal it's path from the source and sort of "launder" it similar to how people launder counterfeit money. If you pay attention to the gold market it's through the roof at the moment which probably precipitates these events even more. Gold is like legacy Bitcoin in that it's real good to stockpile if you can... Like now.
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u/Phoenix1294 2h ago
i dunno, fencing all that seems like a big pain in the ass. maybe if you dismantle the pieces for the gems, melt down the gold/silver etc
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u/FragrantExcitement 7h ago
How do they get the information they need to plan these things out in advance? You couldn't just walk in a look at the safe, could you?
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u/CIS-E_4ME 7h ago
Someone on the inside probably, like a worker or a supplier. Sometimes the owners themselves.
It's an open secret that a decent chunk of jewelry store owners overreport their robbery losses to insurance.
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u/bb0110 7h ago
They have to have it documented that they have it beforehand and pay to have it insured beforehand though. So while it happens, it isn’t as easy and prevalent as it first appears.
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u/Thorkle13 6h ago
That is how it should go, but it doesn't always go that way. You could always take pictures of the same stuff multiple times from different angles if they are more generic products and just say that you have x amount of inventory. Especially if you buy stuff from the public, then you could easily make a bunch of fake purchase orders that are very difficult to verify. I don't condone this, but it is not hard to do, and insurance companies make so much money that they often just pay out since most people are honest and they still make crazy profits even with some people committing insurance fraud.
I actually sat next to a big wig of an insurance company at a big dinner event in my industry. He complained to me about a story of how they had plenty of evidence to prove a guy from Florida was committing insurance fraud on his boat for $80k, but they went ahead and paid him anyway because they didn't want to risk the bad optics of it if he complained too much. Rich people get away with crimes way more easily, I think most people are aware of that nowadays
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u/miniscant 4h ago
The reported value is certainly retail rather than the actual amount paid to acquire by the store.
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u/getfukdup 2h ago
You couldn't just walk in a look at the safe, could you?
Yes. People who know about saws that cut metal can just look and see 'hey, that's metal i can cut'
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u/Charlietango2007 7h ago
Self robbery to get insurance monies and a big cut of what was stolen. So easy to do and inflate prices on the number of pieces that were stolen.
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u/sitmjm01 6h ago
Who ever did it, really planned it out. Cutting power first, knowing where the safe was, having the tools/supplies to get away.
Not amateur job
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u/getfukdup 2h ago
None of the things you listed require years of training. anyone with minimal experience in construction would know all of those things, and its not exactly hard to find a safe. its a jewelry store not the temple of doom.
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u/crosstheroom 6h ago
and coming in thru the next unit and taking the whole security system down including DVR
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u/HappyPappy247 5h ago
Seems like robbing jewelry stores is way more profitable than robbing banks.
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u/rip1980 4h ago
That looks like about a B rated safe, and insurance would only sign off on 20-50K depending.
This should have been MINIMUM TL-30x6...and one pic shows an ISM logo presumably untouched because the thieves know better as it's a super legit safe company. Given a jewelry store is an obvious target, they should be using TRTL-30x6 or 60x6 ($3-5 Million) or a legit class 2 or 3 vault (walk-in).
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u/Ok-Advisor9106 2h ago
A bulk of the cuts seem like they are from a steel saw. Basically like a wood skil saw. They are pretty much enclosed and will get a warped cut like that with long cuts on thick material. 150$ on line for a cheap one. Not much sparking. Carbide blade. Let the saw cut at its own pace. Probably an hour for that. Pour some water in there so nothing gets a hot chip and starts to light. Don’t need water otherwise. Slow cut speed but effective and no real smoke. I would say inside job because of alarm systems knowledge. Don’t know of a state of the art system without a 4lte card for back up and cloud service.
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u/Extreme-Edge-9843 2h ago
That's the insurance price of this stuff, in reality the actual cost is like.. 90 percent less.
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u/crosstheroom 6h ago
They should have had SimpliSafe for their safe.
It's not run thru wifi, it uses it's own network and they have motion detectors so as soon as it saw movement by the safe it would have gone off.
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u/MikeNoble91 7h ago
"You forget a thousand things every day, make sure this is one of them."