Had Sherlock Holmes existed in real life, perhaps the 7 largest unsolved heists in the world would have been worked out with the money recovered and the perpetrators responsible behind bars. But our world is not perfect, and criminals, those with an above average IQ at least, are able to make off with unfathomable amounts of money, living the remainder of their life in luxury.
The cases in this list are incredible not just because of the amount of money the transgressors made off with, but the methods employed to remain untraceable and successfully escape, despite the law using all of its resources to capture the criminals. I have always been a fan of daring heists, and some of these robberies are actually inspired by movies. Of course, often even the most daring of heists are caught, as in the Swedish Helicopter Heist, where a gang of criminals stole a helicopter to further steal cash deposits. The ingenuity lays in the fact that the police were unable to use their own choppers since the gang had left a bag at the hangar which was marked ‘bomb’. You might be wondering why I’m mentioning it here instead of in my list. The reason is that despite all these precautions, everyone involved was subsequently arrested and convicted. Had they not been convicted, they would definitely have been included because they stole so much money – the Swedish police warned that Stockholm’s ATMs could run out of cash.
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On the other hand, if the amount wasn’t stolen, we would have definitely included D.B. Cooper (not his real name, because no one was able to figure out who he was), a man who could be called the most polite hijacker in the world. After hijacking the flight and claiming there was a bomb in his bag (remember this was in 1971 when TSA and security checks barely existed), he was delivered $200,000 and parachutes which he used to jump off the plane, never to be found. If you are more interested regarding financial, nonviolent crimes, however, you might be interested in the 10 High Profile White Collar Criminals and Their Crime Cases in America.
There are some crimes which we could not include on the list of largest unsolved heists in the world because while the perpetrators were never apprehended, it wasn’t because no one knew who committed the crime. For this, I point out Saddam Hussein, who in 2001, while acting as the President of Iraq, told his son to take an astounding $1 billion from the Iraqi Central Bank, just one day before the US invasion began. People suspected that the funds were withdrawn to help him fight off the US, and gave President Bush another reason to damn Saddam’s character and build support for the war.
Our list of largest unsolved heists in the world includes heists that saw both a large sum of money being stolen and the perpetrators never being identified or apprehended. The list is ranked by amount of money stolen, so the highest amount will be at the top. While I don’t endorse this behavior, it is certainly fun to read about hijinks that robbers got up in order to pull off the 7 largest unsolved heists in the world.
