A woman who worked for the Loomis cash-handling and armored car company in Germany is on the run after absconding with nearly $10 million.
Yasemin Gundogan of Bremen, worked as a currency-packaging assistant for Loomis. She disappeared in late May after loading a vehicle with a cache of stolen cash from the company.
After failing to locate the woman for several weeks, police issued a search warrant against her in July.
Gundogan’s job was to pack banknotes in cash cases. She allegedly put the stolen loot in security bags and placed them into a wheeled bin she covered with litter. She reportedly then rolled the bin outside and placed the cash-laden sacks into a black Mercedes-Benz Vito minivan with stolen license plates.
Gundogan got in the vehicle and disappeared without a trace, according to local media reports. It is not known if she acted alone.
For reasons that remain unclear, other Loomis employees didn’t notice the cash was missing for four days after the theft. Surveillance cameras at the Loomis office were off that day, again for reasons unknown, according to media reports.
Loomis executives have declined to discuss the matter, reportedly waiting for the police to resolve the case.
The investigation is ongoing.
According to the Loomis website, the company traces its origins to 1897, when Lee Loomis set out for the Alaska Gold Rush and started a company specializing in the delivery of supplies and safe travels for miners, along with protecting mined gold via armed dogsleds.
It was also during this time that Lee set out to improve methods of secure transport, which would later serve as the foundation to Loomis Armored Car Service.
This is not the first time Loomis has been hit by a major theft, though the largest heists along those lines date to the 1997.
Loomis (then known as Loomis Fargo) experienced two inside jobs that year, for $17.3 million and $18.8 million.
In the first heist, a regional vault supervisor just loaded more than $17.3 million into a branded truck and then moved the cash to private cars with his associates. He was subsequently caught.
In the second heist, an armored car driver got rid of two of his co-workers by leaving them handcuffed in different locations, hid the money in a storage shed, and moved to Mexico. He was caught the following year, when he tried to re-enter the U.S.
(Edited by Matthew B. Hall and Fern Siegel)
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