We all know this feeling – end of the month, cash is a bit tight and billionaires somehow have gotten richer still. If you live in the US or another country that has easy access to weapons, the solution is obvious – a pumpgun. But if access to firearms is more difficult or you don’t feel like taking the thrill of a robbery, I have an easier plan for you: Stage a heist on someone’s gold cache!
Prerequisites
To get this to work, you’ll need a bit of starting capital. You’ll likely be able to get this somewhat easily in form of a startup loan, because that’s exactly what you’ll be setting up in just a moment. Don’t worry too much about interest, repayment schemes and whatnot – you’ll easily be able to pay it off with the gold you’ll steal.
Additionally, you’ll need to figure out where a gold reserve near you is, and if there’s a lot or building nearby from which you can stage the heist. You’ll also need to brush up on your chemistry, construction, PPE and metallurgy, that’ll make many things easier later.
If you have a kid, try taking them on a tour of the bank’s vault. That should allow you to figure out roughly what the layout of the place would be, and what attack vectors are worthwhile.
Step 1: Set up shop
Our operation won’t be quick, so we’ll need a way to stay shielded for some time. In a location near the gold reserve, start a small renovation project to set up a jewelery store. This will be our cover story. It’d give us reasonable cause to have and handle gold, and the renovation project will let us make noise for quite some time.
Even down the line, we’ll keep this store to maintain easy access to the vault.
Step 2: The big dig
From our little store, we’ll now need to get tunneling. Start digging through the foundation in a dark corner of your shop (probably in a back room). You probably want to have a staging area underneath your shop to store tools and debris for the future.
To get into the vault, your exact procedure will depend on the local place. Coming in from below is generally safest as you won’t be leaving much surface debris, but it’ll also be hardest. If the vault consists of individual cabinets, coming from the side may be useful, too.
You have a bit of liberty making noise during your “renovation”, so drilling is fair game for the moment.
At this stage you could attempt to commit and go all in: drill in, grab as much gold as you can carry and hide for the rest of your life. This might work, but given that we took out loans to get a shop going, it’d be pretty easy for police to get a hold of us. Instead, we’re going for the long con.
While we will be drilling to get us most of the way there, we don’t want to reveal ourselves yet. So if we at all can help it, we won’t be breaking through the vault’s walls – yet. If it accidentally does happen, don’t worry – leave things as they are and closely monitor the situation. If your drilling got detected, and the police is coming up, simply waltz up to them and state that, sorry, you wanted to lay some new cables or pipes or something but got the direction to the road confused down there. You’ll patch the hole back up, no problem, you’re already building stuff anyway.
If you’re lucky, they might even grant you access to the place with all of your tools, which you can use to take additional measurements to refine your future plans.
Step 3: Strategic removal of the gold
It is now time to get rich. Finish your renovations, set up shop – a minimalist, not to say sparse, showroom with a handful of jewelry and watches and whatnot which you could get your hands on for relatively cheap – and buy a bit of gold, 100g perhaps. Yes, buy: you’ll need to keep up a paper trail of legitimacy throughout your operation. Additionally, buy some casting equipment, and various other metals. You’ll need them to prepare a replica.
For the breakthrough, come in cleanly and quietly. Acids or concrete dissolver will likely be the fastest way, just let it soak and remove the goop every morning. And keep the place ventilated, you’ll likely also be releasing a lot of gases in the process. Eventually, you should have a tiny, tiny opening to the vault, hopefully an out-of-sight place.
Now speed is of the essence: Remove one gold bar, and replace it with a replica. There’s many ways to make something look gold, from leaf gold to brass to paints. The best method here would be to use something you’re comfortable with making and modifying quickly, as copying over the number and seal will improve the effectiveness of your replica.
The replica decoy you placed in the vault serves two purposes: For one, it’ll delay detection. Even if in the future you remove more and more gold bars, nobody will notice that the gold is disappearing as the size of the pile will stay the same. For another, it puts a whole bunch of other people in line of an investigation ahead of you. Nobody had access to that gold but the employees of said vault, the people who transported it there, the people who graded it, and so on and so forth. An honest thief breaking into a vault undetected and stealing just one bar of gold? Unlikely.
Though that would require them to overlook the gaping hole in the vault. So you have to, and I cannot stress this enough, absolutely must close the hole you made in a believable fashion.
“Believable” here means that your fix needs to be compatible with the general aesthetic of the vault. A stainless steel plate with that grippy pattern will likely raise fewer suspicions than a wooden plank, and if you anchor it well so it won’t move, and dampen it reasonably well such that it doesn’t sound obviously hollow when punched, it’ll likely keep you covered for quite some time.
Step 4: The long game
Congratulations, you now have ethically sourced yourself some gold. If you got yourself those classic 400 oz gold bars, that’d have you at well over 1 million USD. Don’t go spending it all at once just yet though! Gold comes with a lot of paper trails on its own which, when broken, are deeply suspicious.
But you’re a jeweler. Where do people go to sell old gold chains to make money? Maybe you! And who sells new and fresh gold chains? Also you! So, get crafting, or get yourself an actual goldsmith to get crafting things that fit your brand. Don’t just hand them the bar you just stole though, melt it in first and add some random other things to make it not obviously stolen gold-grade. Silver and copper are popular choices. And instead of the full 400 oz, maybe give them 10 or 20 at a time – believable amounts of stuff people would have traded with you for. Your sparse showfloor of cheap stuff will soon make way for custom made expensive stuff with your logo on it, and become more and more filled.
Step 5: Making friends
Depending on how many people buy your stuff, you’ll find yourself burning through your gold bar eventually. It is only now that you want to take some more bars from the vault – and make some friends there. Melt and chemically alter the gold again, and come to them with bits of it, again in the “couple dozen oz at a time” range and ask them to store it for you. Either directly or pressed into those nice smaller bars. Also come with pretty chains and rings and stuff that you either commission or people brought you in. And as you’re doing day-to-day business on the shop floor, they won’t bat an eye of you coming in once or twice a week to deposit more stuff as obviously the safe in your shop can only hold so much stuff.
As you’re doing this, become one of those very annoying super chatty people and befriend the clerks. Tell them about the history of the items you’re handing in, how a poor bastard had to sell his family heirloom to stay afloat, how some of this gold you’re handing in you got from recreational gold prospecting in the wilderness, how you made a ring for a couple that before marrying got sick of each other and returned the rings to you.
Doing this for a while, you’ll be able to monitor their mood. Should they find out a couple bars got replaced by fakes, you’ll walk into a very different atmosphere compared to usual. Maybe someone got fired, maybe they were handed a lot of extra work to validate the real-ness of all the items stored in there. Maybe they’re contemplating reporting to police, maybe they want to keep it under wraps. After all, who would trust a bank that doesn’t know why gold disappears?
Once you have gotten wind of it, it’s important you stop immediately. They’ll surely add extra security measures going forward. Seal up your holes well with rubble towards the vault, then concrete on your side and continue to enjoy your lifestyle as a jeweler.
Once you get bored with your new life, sell all your stuff. You should be able to have easily taken care of your initial loans, given the filthy profits you were able to extract out of your free gold. So sell your shop and for one last time, go to your favourite vault and deposit all of your gold in there. After all – you know it won’t get stolen from again.
Conclusion
This plan is foolproof and cannot possibly backfire. Thank you for your time, I won’t be taking questions.
If you found this guide useful, please send me a part of the revenue you’re making with this method. I prefer interesting polygons. You’ll find an address in my About page.
Leo Wattenberg 