Are your valuables in bank lockers really safe?

financialexpress.com:

Bank lockers have been an essential part of India’s banking ecosystem for decades. They serve as a secure space for storing valuables ranging from documents to gold and jewellery. India is the second largest consumer of gold in the world, with 22,000 – 25,000 tons of gold in private Indian households, which is 12% of the world’s gold ever mined.

In a country where the cultural significance of assets like gold is deeply ingrained and personal, the demand for bank lockers remains consistently high. While lockers are the usually trusted spaces for the safekeep of many assets, the availability, security and privacy concerns of these lockers need more understanding.

“The safety and security of bank lockers have become points of concern, primarily due to the persistence of age-old infrastructure and security protocols when methods of theft have evolved. There have been multiple cases where bank lockers were compromised,” said Suraj HS, Co-founder at Aurm, an assets protection firm which partners with banks to provide state-of-the-art automated safe deposit locker facilities.

According to reports, Rs 180 crore was lost in 2,632 incidents of robbery, theft, and burglary across 51 banks between 2014 and 2017. In 2017-18 alone, 972 such incidents were recorded – roughly three per day – as per RBI data. Locker thefts make up a significant and growing proportion of these crimes, ranging between 20% and 40% of total thefts annually. Sometimes this was found to be a case of collusion between bank employees and maintenance staff, and in other cases, it involved exploiting technological loopholes. As recently as last week, a service manager of SBI in Mumbai was arrested for stealing gold jewellery worth Rs 3 crore from the bank lockers.