Loot from the ATM blastHow to launder 200,000 rather dirty francs in the casino
Andreas Fischer
3.2.2025
At the Swiss Casino Zurich, tens of thousands of francs from ATM blasts were apparently exchanged for clean money.
Symbolbild: Keystone
Actually unusable: Discolored banknotes from ATM blasts are reappearing in casinos in Zurich and Schaffhausen. Some of the loot can easily be laundered there.
03.02.2025, 21:25
03.02.2025, 22:18
Andreas Fischer
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ATM burglars have apparently sent exchange commandos back to Switzerland.
Young men from Holland have attempted to exchange banknotes marked with robbery-stopping ink in casinos on a grand scale.
They were able to easily wash the loot at slot machines and exchange it for clean notes.
They are blown up or broken into: the number of ATM attacks in Switzerland has been increasing for years. The perpetrators steal large sums of money, as they did at the end of 2022 in the Basel region.
Cash worth CHF 400,000 was stolen in two ATM blasts in Aesch. The perpetrators have still not been caught. At least, one might think, their loot is useless. After all, when ATMs are broken into by force, the banknotes are automatically dyed with robbery-stopping ink and are worthless.
Unless you go to the casino.
A few days after the blasts in Aesch, two young men apparently washed the dirty notes at the Swiss Casino Zurich, as reported by the Tages-Anzeiger newspaper, citing the indictment and a summary penalty order from the Office of the Attorney General.
According to the indictment, the two Dutchmen deposited 19,000 francs on cashless cards at various slot machines, gambled a little and shortly afterwards had the remaining 18,500 francs paid out again - in clean bills.
Money laundering made easy
The procedure worked so well that one of the two men returned the next day and laundered another 53,800 francs. He had less luck at the Casino Schaffhausen, where the cash machines did not accept the discolored bills. A third attempt in Zurich finally failed and the man was arrested.
According to the Tages-Anzeiger newspaper, there is a method to this approach, and other perpetrators have also been convicted. The modus operandi is always the same: Young men travel from Holland with notes that are actually unusable from ATM blasts, exchange the money for fresh bills in casinos and disappear again. A total of 200,000 francs from the blasts in Aesch had reappeared in this way.
They had nothing to do with the blasts themselves, they claimed. They had been instructed to do so under threat. The 20-year-old main accused has now been sentenced by the Federal Criminal Court to a conditional prison sentence of 15 months and banned from the country for five years.
Court criticizes security precautions at Casino Zurich
In the verdict, which is not yet final, the court also criticized the lax security precautions at the Zurich casino in particular. In contrast to the Schaffhausen casino, the machines there had apparently not yet been equipped with color detectors.
This is despite the fact that it could have been known that more and more Swiss ATMs are equipped with anti-robbery paint as a preventive measure against explosions. Casino Zurich considers the court's criticism to be "incomplete and flawed" and has appealed against the ruling.