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Antwerp is a town in Belgium. What comes to mind when I say Antwerp? To me, at least, it's diamonds. It's the hub of the world's diamond trade. Well, I imagine if the town is bustling with diamonds, then it's probably also attracting some criminals wanting to steal those diamonds, right? In 2019, a robbery occurred that really took things to the next level.
It was actually a bank, and it was situated in the Diamond Trading District in Antwerp. Monday morning, bank employees came to work and checked out the vault, but something was wrong with the vault, and they called the police, who had to force their way into the vault, only to find that the place had been robbed. How, though? The bank had all the right security measures.
Cameras watching the bank doors, motion sensors in the bank, and sensors in the vault doors themselves. And everything was secured tight. So how did they get into the vault?
They went through the, like, probably six to eight foot thick concrete wall. They just boreholed. You can actually see three slightly overlapping, kind of like MasterCard logo interlocking circles, boreholes of about a 12-inch diameter, maybe. And they just chewed through it over time, getting through the wall.
And they crawled all the way through, did everything they did, and crawled all the way out. Just kind of army crawled through this sandwich-shaped hole. Wow.
Drilling through a six-foot concrete wall. That must have taken a very long time. In fact, the criminals spent all weekend down there while the bank was closed so they can make a lot of noise without getting caught.
And it really goes to show that if everything is... Because the vault had basically been protected to oblivion on the door. And if anyone messed with that door, tampered with that door, tried to torch cut whatever that door... That was where the alarm was. That was where all the sensors were. All the investment was in the door. Because they said, well, what do you do with walls?
I mean, there's only so much you can do with walls. But you can believe that at least a few bank vaults in Antwerp started looking at their diamonds. And they said, is concrete the only thing that's protecting us? Because we got to at least get some shake sensors in these walls or put one or two cameras in the vault.
Because if somebody goes in the concrete and they're in there all weekend, well, that's a problem.
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