Sparkasse

History

2025: Damage over €30 million due to robbery

On December 29, 2025, in the city of Gelsenkirchen (North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany), a bank store of Sparkasse was robbed. Preliminary material damage is more than €30 million.

According to Bild, the incident was discovered on the morning of Monday, December 30, 2025, after a fire alarm was triggered. Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), citing security sources, reports that 3.2 thousand individual bank cells were hacked as a result of the robbery, which were used by approximately 2.5 thousand customers.

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Фото: Reuters

According to the police, the attackers entered the storage through a multi-level parking lot. Once in the archival premises of the bank, the criminals made a breach in the vault in its wall. A special drilling rig was used for this purpose. Police seized evidence at the crime scene.

Witnesses reported several men with large bags in the parking lot on the night of December 28-29, 2025. On the morning of December 30, a black car was seen with masked people in it. One of them activated an emergency barrier. It was established that the license plate on this car was stolen earlier in Hanover.

The day after the incident, December 31, 2025, a crowd of outraged customers gathered again at the bank branch, trying to get information. The DPA reporter estimated that the number of people gathered reached 200. After trying to break into the premises, the police blocked the entrance to the department. A representative of Sparkasse assured customers that the bank insures each safe deposit box for a standard amount of €10.3 thousand.

Handelsblatt described this crime as one of the largest in the history of German criminal statistics. The exact chronology of events and details of the investigation are established by the police.^[1][2]

Notes