Denmark: Bank robbers count the cost of cashless society

Denmark’s move to becoming a cashless society has seen the country’s bank robberies fall to zero in 2022.

The forward-thinking Scandinavian country has revolutionalised its banking system - and has recorded no robberies as a result.

Denmark has discovered an unexpected benefit of a cashless society after bank robberies in the Scandinavian country fell to zero.

Figures from Finans Danmark, an industry association, show the number of attacks has collapsed in recent years as the shift towards online transactions has led many Danish banks to abandon cash services in branches. While there were 221 bank robberies in 2000, the number of hold-ups in Denmark fell to 121 in 2004, before declining to one in 2021 and none last year.

There were no bank robberies in the country in the 2022 calendar year, with Denmark also recording no ATM machine attacks for the second-consecutive year.

There were also no attacks on Danish ATM machines for a second year running in 2022, a spokeswoman for the association said, adding that financial crime had moved online, with digital fraud on the rise. The disappearance of Danish bank robberies, which was first reported by Bloomberg, is a further sign of how the global financial system is being transformed by the rise of the internet. Only about 20 bank branches in Denmark still hold cash.

Americans remain more traditional than there European cousins in regard to banks. US figures compiled by the FBI suggest there has been an increase in bank-related crimes in America. There were 1,964 bank robberies, burglaries and attacks on armoured cars in the US in 2021, up from 1,788 in 2020. Like the Danes, Britons increasingly favour non-cash forms of payment.

UK Finance, an industry body, found that 57 per cent of all payments in Britain in 2021 were conducted by card, with cash accounting for only 15 per cent. About 23 million consumers had either used cash only once a month or not at all that year, up from 13.7 million in 2020, UK Finance said. At the same time, the growing popularity of internet banking in Britain, which has accelerated since the pandemic, has prompted many high street lenders to pare back their branch networks, with thousands of sites closing in recent years.

This has led to worries that consumers who still rely on cash are being cut off from the banking system.

There has also been an increase in online fraud and other types of scams in recent years as criminals take advantage of the rise of internet banking.

THE TIMES