Self-Taught Thieves Keep Blowing Up ATMs—And Walking Away With Millions

Hedi led me through the city, toward the center. We were heading for his favorite sandwich place, one of the few cash-only businesses left in Utrecht. In order to pay, I had to stop at an ATM. He told me about a night, years ago, when he was sleeping at a friend’s place. Two boys showed up, exhausted, carrying a shoebox, looking for somewhere to rest. While they were passed out in chairs, Hedi’s friend waved him over—opening the shoebox. It was crammed full of fresh, pungent cash, about 200,000 euros, Hedi thought. Recalling the scene, he sniffed the air three times. “It smelled unreal,” he said. “Like fire.”

The week I was visiting Utrecht, there were reports that a suspected Dutch plofkraker had been shot and arrested by police in far away Vienna after multiple ATMs were bombed on the busy morning of the city’s marathon. Before I left the city, I went out to the Overvecht district with Boumanjal. We explored the housing projects and run-down basketball courts where he spent his youth. We stopped on California Drive and I left Boumanjal idling in the car. I wandered around to a back lot where the explosion at the training rooms took place in 2020.

There were stacked bikes in a yard and patterned carpets, folded over a washing line to air. A flat stone bollard with weeds growing around it leaned at an angle against a trash can. It resembled a headstone. I found the likely spot where gang member Baba, after the explosion, vomited—from the shock, he said at the time. The reality of the risks they’d been running seemed to catch up to Baba, Jager, Bolle, and Yamaha at different speeds.

Baba was arrested that day, in September 2020. About two months later, Jager and Bolle attempted to rob an ATM in a region by the Rhine. They were caught and arrested too. Days after that, Yamaha and the Dutchman went out themselves, in another high-speed Audi, this one stolen. They were spotted by police, followed, and forced to abandon the vehicle, setting this one on fire. The pair were recorded on wiretaps explaining they’d been cornered on a dead-end street with creeks behind them. Their only option was to escape via a forest, plowing through a pole at one point. “We rammed that down, bam, bam…floored it through the woods and got out…. Helicopter came and everything. We just got away in time,” Yamaha said.

In the days before Christmas that year, the Dutchman was driving with Yamaha on the A2 highway out of Utrecht, testing top speeds before another planned plofkraak. Moving away from the city, then returning, they got their car up over 190 mph. They saw traffic ahead. As the Dutchman tried to slow down, a rear tire burst. He was traveling at about 160 mph when he hit a guardrail and veered across the highway, striking a student in her car, killing her. She was 20 years old.

The Dutchman later received a three-year sentence for causing the fatal accident. At their group trial, the members of the Green Box group and the Dutchman were handed prison sentences ranging from nine months to five years. The Dutchman arrived for a hearing, reportedly, in a T-shirt that bore a striking message: “Make money not friends.”

Tom Lamont is a GQ correspondent.

A version of this story originally appeared in the November 2025 issue of GQ with the title “How Do You Rob an ATM? You Blow It Up”