Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

West­ern Di­vi­sion po­lice are in­ves­ti­gat­ing the theft of $600,000 in cash from an ATM in St James, ear­ly on Fri­day morn­ing.

Po­lice said a work­er at the bank was per­form­ing checks on the soft­ware of the Roy­al Bank of Cana­da ATM at the cor­ner of the West­ern Main Road and Bournes Road, at around 7 am when he no­ticed fluc­tu­a­tions in the sys­tem.

He con­tact­ed a pri­vate se­cu­ri­ty com­pa­ny which sent a team of guards to the ATM.

The se­cu­ri­ty guards no­ticed that the ATM was bro­ken in­to and the cash miss­ing.

Po­lice were called in and saw that a win­dow at the side of the build­ing was bro­ken, which was most like­ly the point of en­try for the ban­dits.

Crime scene in­ves­ti­ga­tors vis­it­ed the scene and are con­tin­u­ing en­quiries.

When Guardian Me­dia vis­it­ed the ATM on Fri­day af­ter­noon, the en­trance was locked.

A note post­ed on the door ad­vised cus­tomers to vis­it the near­est ATMs at West­mall or Long Cir­cu­lar Mall.

One cus­tomer said it was frus­trat­ing as it was al­most the end of Ju­ly and most peo­ple would be vis­it­ing ATMs to check their bal­ance.

“It’s a re­al­ly con­ve­nient lo­ca­tion, so I was hop­ing there would have been more no­tice that this one was tem­porar­i­ly closed.

“It’s right along the main road so a lot of peo­ple would just pass in to see if they got their salaries or pen­sions or what.

“If they were to leave and go trav­el to Long Cir­cu­lar Mall, that’s a $5 in taxi fare they could have saved.”

Re­spond­ing to Guardian Me­dia’s email on Fri­day, RBC con­firmed that there was an “in­ci­dent” at the ATM, but did not dis­close any more de­tails.

“The mat­ter was prompt­ly re­port­ed to lo­cal au­thor­i­ties and as it is cur­rent­ly un­der in­ves­ti­ga­tion, we can­not pro­vide any fur­ther com­ments.”

Se­nior po­lice said safe­ty mech­a­nisms in the form of rou­tine checks from se­cu­ri­ty and re­mote mon­i­tor­ing were cru­cial in pre­vent­ing break-ins.

“Reg­u­lar checks both sched­uled and un­sched­uled on the part of the con­tract­ed se­cu­ri­ty com­pa­nies to en­sure that no el­e­ment of the se­cu­ri­ty ap­pa­ra­tus with­in these in­sti­tu­tions are com­pro­mised,” the po­lice said.

“Prop­er­ly func­tion­ing CCTV sys­tems for ease of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion in the event there is a breach which will be able to as­sist the po­lice and oth­er law en­force­ment to take the nec­es­sary ac­tions.”

The of­fi­cer al­so re­mind­ed bank cus­tomers to be mind­ful of their sur­round­ings when vis­it­ing rel­a­tive­ly iso­lat­ed ATM ma­chines that were not part of a larg­er bank.