TIL: In 1990 a courier was robbed on a street in London, England. The robber made off with bearer bonds to the value of £292 million. Today, this is equivalent to £758 million – or $1.086 billion USD. This is still the highest amount ever stolen in a street robbery.

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_bonds_robbery

What do you think?

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  1. Notes:

    Although the robbery was made to look like a random mugging, it turned out to have been a carefully planned heist.

    I rounded up the actual value of the bonds from £291.9 to £292 million to make it read easier.

    To get a the GBP figure for 2022, I took the 2021 value of £710 million and added an amount to account for UK inflation in the first eight months of 2022. CPI was 10.1% for the 12 months to July 2022. To arrive at a figure for end of Aug 2022, I used the following calculation (in millions): £710 + (£710/100 x 10.1 x 8/12) to get £757.8 – I rounded this up to £758 million – again, because it reads easier.

    To arrive at a USD figure, I looked up the [USD-GBP exchange rate](https://www.poundsterlinglive.com/bank-of-england-spot/historical-spot-exchange-rates/usd/USD-to-GBP-1990) on 2nd May 1990. It was 1 USD to 0.6096 GBP – or 1 GBP to 1.64 USD. This gave me a 1990 USD figure of $479,152,987.52. I entered this into a [US inflation calculator](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/) and the result was $1,086,163,202.22 – I rounded down to $1.086 billion because I did not think anyone would actually read all of this.

  2. Wouldn’t they just void those if they are stolen? I mean where can he even redeem them now if they are such high value.

    Even if found they will be good only as eye candy

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