Top 10 Biggest Bank Heists of All Time

The most famous number in the history of bank robbery is almost certainly wrong. Guinness World Records lists the "greatest robbery of a bank" as the July 2007 theft of $282 million from the Dar Es Salaam Investment Bank in Baghdad, and that figure tops nearly every list on the internet. Yet within a day of the theft, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official told NBC News that investigators had corrected the figure: $366,000 in US dollars and 282 million Iraqi dinars were missing, and HSBC, which owned 70 percent of the bank, said the loss was "significantly less than $1 million." Somewhere between Karrada and the world's newsrooms, "282 million" became "$282 million," and it has never been un-reported.

That is the problem with ranking bank heists: the loudest figures are the least reliable, and the categories are a mess. Lists routinely mix cash depots, safe-deposit centres, diamond exchanges and the one-time removal of a national reserve by the dictator who controlled it. Strip those out and what remains is a smaller, stranger and more honest list, in which a fake Brazilian landscaping company and a Beirut church wall loom far larger than Baghdad.

This list ranks the ten biggest physical heists of actual banks by value in today's money, with the nominal figure alongside, using the lowest well-supported figure wherever sources disagree.

Methodology

What counts. A physical robbery or burglary of a bank: a licensed deposit-taking institution or a central bank, including a bank's own safe-deposit vault. The crime must have been committed against the bank from outside its ownership, which is why the March 2003 removal of roughly $920 million to $1 billion from the Central Bank of Iraq on Saddam Hussein's written order is discussed below but not ranked.

What does not count. Cash depots and armored-car companies (Securitas, Dunbar, GardaWorld, Brink's-Mat), private safe-deposit centres (Knightsbridge, Hatton Garden), diamond-exchange vaults (Antwerp), airports and trains (Lufthansa, the Great Train Robbery), and cyber-heists (Bangladesh Bank). Several were bigger than entries here, and they get their own section.

How the ranking works. Each heist is ranked by inflation-adjusted value in 2025 US dollars. The nominal value is converted to dollars at the exchange rate of the time (rounded), then adjusted using the US Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U annual averages (2025 average: 321.9). Where sources give a range, the lowest credible figure is ranked and the table shows the range. Amounts, dates and outcomes were checked against Guinness World Records and contemporary reporting from NBC, CBS, RTÉ, O Povo and El Financiero.

List of Biggest Bank Heists of All Time

10. Lloyds Bank, Baker Street, London (1971)

On the night of 11 September 1971, a gang tunnelled 40 feet from a rented leather-goods shop two doors down and came up through the floor of the Lloyds Bank vault at 185 Baker Street, emptying 268 safe-deposit boxes. Amateur radio enthusiast Robert Rowlands picked up the gang's walkie-talkie chatter and alerted Scotland Yard, which searched 750 banks that night and still missed the right one.

The amount is a genuine unknown, which is why the heist sits at the bottom of this list rather than the middle. Official estimates run from £1.25 million to £3 million, and only £231,000 was recovered. Anthony Gavin, Reg Tucker and Thomas Stephens received 12 years each in January 1973. The legend that a D-Notice suppressed coverage is false; none was ever requested. At the top of its range, Baker Street would rank fifth.

Taken: £1.25 million to £3 million (about $3 million to $7 million), 11 September 1971; roughly $24 million to $58 million in 2025 dollars.

9. Banco Río, Acassuso, Argentina (2006)

Argentina's "robo del siglo" began on 13 January 2006 as a conventional armed hold-up at a Banco Río branch in Acassuso, a wealthy Buenos Aires suburb: six men, 23 hostages, negotiators outside. The robbers then vanished through an 18-metre tunnel into a storm drain, escaping by inflatable boat. Their guns were plastic replicas. They opened 147 safe-deposit boxes and, according to the 20th-anniversary account in El Financiero, took about $19 million in cash and 80 kilograms of jewellery, leaving a rhyming note: "in a neighbourhood of rich people, without weapons or grudges, it's only money, not love."

The gang was undone when the wife of member Alberto "Beto" de la Torre, suspecting he planned to flee with a mistress, went to the police. Sentences handed down in 2010 ranged from nine to 21.5 years, mostly reduced on appeal, and only about $1 million was recovered.

Taken: about $19 million cash plus jewellery, 13 January 2006; roughly $30 million in 2025 dollars.

8. Sparkasse Gelsenkirchen-Buer, Germany (2025)

The newest entry is the one whose value is least settled. Over the weekend of 27 to 28 December 2025, thieves drilled into the vault of a Sparkasse branch in Gelsenkirchen-Buer from the adjoining parking garage and broke open about 95 percent of its 3,300 safe-deposit boxes, affecting roughly 2,700 customers. CBS News reported an initial loss estimate of €30 million (about $35 million); police have since given a range of €10 million to €90 million, because the boxes held cash, jewellery and gold that only their owners can value.

Police released CCTV of masked suspects in January 2026, and in February Sparkasse executives met around 200 victims to apologise; no arrests have been made. If the top of the police range proves right, this would be the biggest bank heist in European history. The ranking uses the €30 million working estimate.

Taken: about €30 million (about $35 million), 27 to 28 December 2025; police range €10 million to €90 million.

7. ABN AMRO, Antwerp, Belgium (2007)

The Antwerp heist that belongs on a list of bank robberies is not the famous one. In March 2007, a man who had spent a year establishing himself as the Argentine diamond dealer "Carlos Hector Flomenbaum" walked into the ABN AMRO branch in Antwerp's diamond district, where he was a trusted customer with vault access, and left with 120,000 carats of diamonds worth about $28 million, according to NBC News and the trade publication Rapaport. The stones belonged to eight Antwerp trading firms that had pledged them as collateral for bank loans.

The passport behind the identity had been reported stolen in Israel years earlier; the thief was never caught despite a €2 million reward. No force, no tunnel, no weapons: the vault was opened for him because he had been patient enough to become someone the bank trusted.

Taken: about $28 million in diamonds, discovered 5 March 2007; roughly $43 million in 2025 dollars.

6. Société Générale, Nice, France (1976)

Albert Spaggiari spent two months leading a gang through Nice's sewers to dig an eight-metre tunnel up into the vault of the Société Générale. They broke through over the Bastille Day weekend of 16 July 1976, opened 371 safe-deposit boxes, and left on 20 July having welded the vault door shut from the inside. On the wall they wrote "sans armes, ni haine, ni violence": without weapons, without hatred, without violence.

The haul was an estimated 46 million francs in cash, securities and valuables, roughly $9.6 million at 1976 rates, and none of it was ever recovered. Spaggiari was arrested that autumn; on 10 March 1977 he jumped from a courthouse window onto a parked car and escaped on a waiting motorcycle. He died in 1989, still a fugitive.

Taken: about 46 million francs (about $9.6 million), 16 to 20 July 1976; roughly $54 million in 2025 dollars.

5. Banque de France, Toulon, France (1992)

France's own "casse du siècle" took place on 16 December 1992 at the Banque de France branch in Toulon, metres from the police station, without a shot fired. The gang, which had taken a senior employee's family hostage to force entry, drove away with 146 million francs, about €22 million at conversion and roughly $27 million at the time, according to The Local. Some later accounts round the figure up to 160 million francs; 146 million is the figure tied to the trial.

Only about a tenth was recovered. Marc Armando, regarded as the brains of the operation, was sentenced to 18 years; arrested again in a cocaine case in May 2013, he killed himself in a Marseille detention centre within hours.

Taken: 146 million francs (about $27 million), 16 December 1992; roughly $62 million in 2025 dollars.

4. United California Bank, Laguna Niguel, California (1972)

On 27 March 1972, an Ohio crew led by Amil Dinsio, whom the FBI later called "America's greatest bank burglar," dynamited a hole through the roof of the United California Bank in Laguna Niguel, disabled the alarm, and spent the weekend emptying safe-deposit boxes. The accepted figure is $9 million in cash and valuables; Dinsio has claimed the vault held as much as $30 million, and at least one account puts the take above $12 million. The $9 million figure is used here.

The crew flew to California under their own names and left fingerprints in a rented townhouse's dishwasher; when a near-identical burglary hit an Ohio bank, the FBI connected the two and arrested the gang. Dinsio's claim that the target was a slush fund linked to Richard Nixon has never been verified. In today's money the job still outranks every modern American vault theft, including those that put names on the FBI's most wanted list.

Taken: $9 million (claims range up to $30 million), 27 March 1972; roughly $69 million in 2025 dollars.

3. Northern Bank, Belfast, Northern Ireland (2004)

On 20 December 2004, men posing as police took the families of two Northern Bank officials, Chris Ward and Kevin McMullan, hostage, then forced the men to load cash from the bank's Belfast headquarters into a white van during the Christmas rush. They took £26.5 million: £16.5 million in uncirculated Northern Bank notes, £5.5 million in used notes, and £4.5 million in other banks' notes, euros and dollars, as RTÉ reported. At about $1.93 to the pound, that was roughly $51 million, then the largest cash robbery in UK history.

PSNI Chief Constable Hugh Orde blamed the Provisional IRA, a conclusion endorsed by the British government and the Independent Monitoring Commission; the IRA denied it, and the fallout nearly derailed the peace process. The bank reprinted its entire note issue by March 2005, rendering most of the uncirculated cash worthless. Nobody has been convicted of the robbery itself: Ward was acquitted when prosecutors offered no evidence, and a Cork adviser's money-laundering conviction was quashed in 2012. Roughly £2.5 million was recovered.

Taken: £26.5 million (about $51 million), 20 December 2004; roughly $87 million in 2025 dollars.

2. British Bank of the Middle East, Beirut, Lebanon (1976)

On 22 January 1976, nine months into Lebanon's civil war, a guerrilla force blasted through the wall the British Bank of the Middle East shared with the church next door, blew the vault, and cleared its safe-deposit boxes of cash, gold and jewellery while the district around them was a battlefield. Guinness World Records lists it as the greatest robbery of safe-deposit boxes ever and gives two valuations: $50 million (£22 million) according to former Finance Minister Lucien Dahdah, and "an absolute minimum of $20 million (£9 million)" from another source.

Attribution has never been settled, which is why the figure cannot be: the raid is usually ascribed to Palestinian fighters working with professional safecrackers, no one was charged, and the contents were never seen again. On the $20 million minimum it sits just behind Fortaleza; on Dahdah's $50 million, it is the biggest bank heist in history by a wide margin.

Taken: $20 million to $50 million, 22 January 1976; roughly $113 million to $283 million in 2025 dollars.

1. Banco Central do Brasil, Fortaleza, Brazil (2005)

Three months before the heist, a company calling itself Grama Sintética (artificial turf) rented a house a block from the Banco Central's regional vault in Fortaleza and began carrying out soil in vans, posing as a landscaping business. On the weekend of 6 to 7 August 2005, the gang broke through the vault floor at the end of an 80-metre tunnel, timber-lined, lit and ventilated. They took R$164,755,150 in used R$50 notes, about $70 million at the time and more than three tonnes of paper, according to the 20-year retrospective in Diário do Nordeste. The notes were unregistered, so the bank could not trace them.

The gang began spending within weeks, and the trail produced the first arrests; the suspected mastermind, Luis Fernando Ribeiro, was kidnapped and murdered in October 2005 even after a ransom was paid. By 2020, O Povo counted 143 people charged across 28 prosecutions, 120 convicted, and R$24.9 million recovered through seizures and 57 judicial auctions, about 15 percent of the loss. It is the largest documented theft of cash from a bank in history, and the one heist on this list whose headline figure comes from the bank itself, to the real. That certainty is why it ranks first ahead of Beirut.

Taken: R$164,755,150 (about $70 million), 6 to 7 August 2005; roughly $115 million in 2025 dollars.

Summary of the Top 10 Biggest Bank Heists of All Time

Adjustment uses BLS CPI-U annual averages (1971: 40.5; 1972: 41.8; 1976: 56.9; 1992: 140.3; 2004: 188.9; 2005: 195.3; 2006: 201.6; 2007: 207.3; 2025: 321.9). Exchange rates are period averages, rounded.

The Famous Heists That Are Not Bank Heists

Dar Es Salaam Investment Bank, Baghdad, July 2007 ("$282 million"). Four guards at the Karrada branch vanished overnight with the cash. The Interior Ministry's corrected figure was $366,000 and 282 million dinars (then worth around $230,000), and HSBC put the loss under $1 million. The coincidence of "282 million" in both versions is hard to read as anything but a currency error, and a small private bank that had genuinely lost $282 million would not have kept trading for another decade, which Dar Es Salaam did.

Central Bank of Iraq, 18 March 2003 (about $920 million to $1 billion). Hours before the US invasion, three trucks left the central bank with roughly $900 million in $100 bills and up to $100 million in euros, removed by Qusay Hussein on a handwritten order from his father. It is the largest sum ever taken from a bank, but a head of state emptying his own central bank is expropriation, not robbery, any more than a government relocating its gold reserves is a theft. It is the exclusion most likely to be argued with.

Bangladesh Bank, February 2016 ($81 million). Hackers used the bank's SWIFT credentials to order $101 million out of its account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; $81 million reached Manila and vanished into casinos, and Bangladesh reported seizing $81 million in the Philippines in September 2025. No vault was touched, which is why it belongs with the most dangerous hacker groups and the most wanted cybercriminals rather than here. By nominal value it would rank second on this list.

Knightsbridge Safe Deposit Centre, London, 12 July 1987 (about £60 million). Valerio Viccei bribed the centre's managing director, walked in to rent a box, drew a gun, hung a "temporarily closed" sign on the door and emptied the vault. The estimated £60 million (about $98 million then) would rank second here, but the centre was a private safe-deposit business, not a bank.

Securitas depot, Tonbridge, 21 to 22 February 2006 (£52.9 million). The UK's largest cash robbery, after the depot manager's family was kidnapped; nearly £20 million was recovered and eight men were convicted. A cash-handling depot, not a bank.

Antwerp Diamond Centre, 15 to 16 February 2003 (over $100 million). Leonardo Notarbartolo's crew opened 109 of 189 boxes in the diamond exchange's vault; Notarbartolo later claimed the take was nearer $20 million. A diamond-bourse vault, not a bank.

Hatton Garden Safe Deposit, April 2015 (up to £14 million), Dunbar Armored, Los Angeles, 1997 ($18.9 million), and the GardaWorld facility in Sylmar, Los Angeles, 31 March 2024 (upwards of $20 million, unsolved) are excluded for the same reason: safe-deposit company, armored-car company, cash-storage company.

Two bank heists that may belong but cannot be sized. On 1 December 2020, about 30 gunmen held the centre of Criciúma, Brazil, for two hours, blew the vault of a Banco do Brasil branch and left with a sum the bank has refused to disclose; police called it the largest robbery in Santa Catarina's history. The January 2013 tunnel raid on a Volksbank in Berlin-Steglitz opened around 300 boxes, with losses reported at up to €10 million, never confirmed. Ireland's largest bank robbery, the 2009 tiger kidnapping at Bank of Ireland's College Green cash centre (€7.6 million), is verified but too small to make the ten.

What the Ten Reveal

Tunnels beat guns, and inside knowledge beats both. Six of the ten involved no violence against anyone inside the bank: Fortaleza, Nice, Baker Street and Acassuso were tunnels; Antwerp was a trusted customer; Laguna Niguel came through the roof. The two biggest armed jobs, Belfast and Toulon, pointed weapons not at the vault but at employees' families at home.

The money almost never comes back. The best recovery rate on the list is Fortaleza's 15 percent, and that took 15 years and 57 auctions. Beirut, Nice and Antwerp returned nothing. Vault cash is untraceable the moment it leaves, which is why banks hold less of it than they used to and why serious money now moves through stock exchanges and payment networks rather than cash drawers.

Nominal lists reward recency; adjusted lists reward the 1970s. By face value, Gelsenkirchen and Antwerp would leapfrog Nice and Laguna Niguel; adjusted, two heists from the 1970s sit in the top six and Beirut threatens the top spot. A list that does not say which measure it uses is not really a ranking.

The ceiling has been falling since 2005. Fortaleza remains the largest documented cash theft from a bank, and nothing since has come close in verified terms; the largest "bank robberies" of the past decade were done with credentials rather than crowbars. The era of the hundred-million-dollar vault job is probably over, which makes the ten above less a live leaderboard than a closed chapter: the last great physical heists, ranked honestly, with the famous phantom at the top finally set aside.