French Thieves Use Vacuums to Suck Thousands from Safes

The key to the thieves’ nearly uninterrupted streak of success, per French reports, is the way that Monoprix delivers money from the checkouts to its safes: Envelopes of cash are funneled in via pneumatic suction tubes. Whereas breaching the safe itself might be considerably difficult, requiring explosives or safecracking, the thieves realized that if they just drilled into the delivery tubes near the safebox and hooked up a powerful vacuum, they could suck the money out and get at it much more easily.

I don’t know the specifics, so there may be a good reason that they haven’t fixed this problem during the four years the thieving has been going on, but it would seem a check valve would be useful here.