Milan UniCredit vault traps would-be burglar for nine hours
Time-delay safe locks keys until morning, old-school physical security embarrasses smart-surveillance era
A would-be burglar in Milan discovered the underrated power of simple mechanics this week: bank vaults are designed to keep people in as effectively as they keep them out.
According to Euronews, a 24-year-old Bangladeshi national entered a UniCredit branch on Viale Certosa during business hours and made his way into the vault area, apparently intending to break into customers’ safe-deposit boxes after closing. Private security guards spotted him on CCTV around 9pm as he attempted to force the boxes and called police.
That was the easy part. The harder part was that the police couldn’t actually get him out.
The vault keys were not conveniently located in a guard’s pocket or behind a glass panel; they were locked inside a time-delay safe that would not open until 8am the next morning, Euronews reports. Firefighters were brought in and spent hours breaking into the safe to retrieve the keys. The man was eventually extracted around 5am—after roughly nine hours inside the vault—reportedly in good health. The vault’s ventilation system did its job; the intruder’s plan did not.
UniCredit said in a statement that its alarm systems and procedures worked as intended and that staff immediately contacted emergency services. Investigators are now reviewing surveillance footage to determine how he reached the vault area without being stopped earlier.
It’s a neat inversion of the modern security arms race. Modern safety is often framed as ever-more “smart” layers—analytics, AI cameras, centralized monitoring, and compliance rituals that generate paperwork but rarely change physics. Yet the decisive control here wasn’t a facial-recognition model; it was a time-delay safe and a key-management routine that assumed human fallibility and planned for it.
The outcome also highlights an awkward truth for both criminals and regulators: robust security often looks boring. A vault that can’t be opened quickly is inconvenient for everyone, including the authorities trying to resolve an incident. That inconvenience is the point.
The man was arrested on suspicion of attempted aggravated theft. No one was physically harmed—unless you count the ego damage of turning a robbery into an involuntary overnight stay in a metal box built to ignore persuasion.