Why No One Can Break Into The Most Secure Place In The World (Fort Knox)

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👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/OddlySpecificBot 📅︎︎ Oct 31 2019 🗫︎ replies
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This episode is brought to you by Dashlane; Try Dashlane Premium free for 30 days at www.dashlane.com/infographics and never forget another password and keep all your online accounts secure! It doesn’t matter how good you are, or how much criminal expertise the crack-team you put together has, there are still some places a person just cannot get into. Maybe you want to break in to the Svalbard International Seed Vault. First you’d have to get to a remote island in the Arctic circle and then get past motion detectors, blast proof doors and a meter thick steel reinforced wall. And all for some seeds. Or maybe you want to get your hands on the 4,600 tons of gold in the Bank of England gold vault. Well, bombs wouldn’t do much against the 8 foot thick walls,, and if you want to get in through the gigantic main doors you’ll need a set of three-feet long keys. But to even get that far you’ll need to get past a state of the art security system. It’s not going to happen, at least, we don’t think it will, but so-called impossible crimes have been committed before and another may surprise us. But what about the USA’s Fort Knox, a place that has become a byword for security. You’d be richer than you could imagine if you could get away with the loot, but how on Earth would you go about the heist? Well, first of all you should know what’s in there. According to the Bureau of the Fiscal Reserve in 2018 there was 147,341,858.382 ounces of gold kept in Fort Knox. That’s around 4,177,071 kilos. Most of that is in the form of gold bars and if you got your hands on it you could end up with around $200 trillion dollars at the price of gold today. Of course you’d probably crash the gold market trying to sell off that much, but let’s just say you’d be set for life. $200 trillion worth of gold sounds like a lot, and it is, but, according to the United States Mint this isn’t even close the largest amount that has been stored there. The most gold the vault has held was in 1941 when it had over four times as much at 649.6 million ounces. That’s around 18 million kilos give or take. Regardless of how many hundreds of millions of ounces of gold are in the vault, you’re likely not going to be able to get it all out of there at once. You’ll probably be limited to as much as you can get into the back of your trucks. U.S. law states that the most weight the biggest tandem semi-trucks can carry is 80,000 pounds (36,000 kg), so let’s just say you have one of those. Obviously if you’re pulling off the biggest gold heist in history, you’re not that worried about breaking the law concerning carrying too heavy of a load, but it’s likely the law is in place for a good reason. You don’t want any accidents during your heist or your truck breaking down, and you definitely don’t want to get pulled over for carrying a too heavy load. We just checked today’s gold price per kilo and it was about $43,000. That means with a full load you’d have a legal value of $1,548,000,000. We think that’s enough; you don’t want to be greedy afterall. Ok, now you’ve worked out the truck and how much you’ll get away with, but how do you fill it up? We know this can’t be a one man operation, there’s just too much weight to move. The U.S. mint says that usually each bar of gold measures 7 inches x 3 and 5/8 inches x 1 and 3/4 inches and weighs approximately 27.5 pounds (about 12.5 kilos). Heavy, but still light enough that it wouldn’t be too much trouble for the average adult to move around. But even with a good team and maybe some industrial carts you have in your truck, it would still take a fair amount of time to fill up, since your truck can hold almost 3,000 bars. Nothing you can’t handle though, you have your A-Team after all, consisting of you, your buddy, your other buddy, and a couple of guys you met at a concert last month. Ok, truck, carts, friends, big swole muscles ready to lift - now it’s time to figure out how to actually get inside. First, you’ll have to break some bad news to the boys. Since the vault started storing gold in 1937, no one has ever broken into it. No one has even tried, because, well, it just seems so impossible. For starters, the vault is located on a military base, hence the name “Fort” Knox. There are literally thousands of people living on the base,and it’s huge, measuring 109,000 acres (170 square miles, of 441 km²). At any given time around 30,000 soldiers might be stationed either on or close to the base along with plenty of tanks, armored personnel carriers and military attack helicopters. So you’ll have to get past them, as well as many heavily armed Mint Police, just to get to the depository. You should also know that the building where the vault is located, is totally out of bounds. There’s an extremely rigorous process to vet anyone coming to the vault. Absolutely no one is allowed to just show up and waltz in, no matter how important, no matter how good their documentation is, not even the President of the United States. So let’s be honest, you’re never getting past the thousands of military personnel, but let’s just say for the sake of fun that you and your team have an ace in the hole. You have used mini drones that can bypass detection to fly all over the base and spray a very powerful chemical agent in the air that causes anyone who breathes it in to become unconscious for quite some time. Again, we know this is a total fantasy but let’s just pretend you’re a rogue nerve agent scientist that has developed the perfect knockout gas. You now at least have the opportunity to get your truck close to the building housing the vault, but oops, it’s surrounded by ten foot high electrified fences, but that’s not a big problem because you have special cutters. Also, now that you are close, even though everyone in the vicinity is knocked out, the radar is still active, and what that radar catches will be sent back to other bases. But let’s just say you have managed to block the radar signals, because you met a guy in a bar the other month who did a stint at Area 51 and he knows all about jamming signals. Radar, electric fences, getting past that is heist 101 class stuff. The radar was the hard part, and the fences, even the electric ones, as we said you can easily get past. But now another problem has arisen, because that pretty lawn around the depository is littered with landmines. Okay, so you had to Google “How to get through a minefield” and you were pleasantly surprised to find lots of, hmm, experts. They told you to get ahold of a metal detector and mark your path as you go. Just in case though, you have some of those huge funny-looking military foam boots to spread your weight over a given surface. How did you get them? Well, let’s just say you know a guy who knows a guy. You plan your route, marking your way with little flags, and that’s the track you will use with your gold-filled carts. You are finally at the building, thankfully with all of your limbs still intact, and you are now well aware that it is filled with armed mint police. Time to get out the gas masks and fill that place with your special go-to-sleep chemical concoction. After a few minutes filling the building you are pretty sure they are in La La Land. If the outer door is locked, no problem, this door you can blast through. It will be the easiest door of the day. Inside you have to get to the vaults at the bottom of the building, and this is how they have been described “A two level steel and concrete vault that is divided into compartments… The vault casing is constructed of steel plates, steel I-beams and steel cylinders laced with hoop bands and encased in concrete.” The door itself is said to weigh 20 tons. You cannot blast through this door, and it takes a number of combinations to open it and no one person in the world has the complete combination. In fact, all the different people who share some knowledge of how to get in all have a set of different instructions. You would need to know who all these people are and get them all to tell you the truth. Luckily, you met a hacker the other month who has spent years hacking military databases and especially anyone even remotely concerned with the vault and its security. Prior to your heist you gained knowledge of these people, to the extent that you know what aftershave they use and who their favorite niece is. You have kidnapped these people and are now presently showing them live feeds of their most loved family members, including their beloved grandparents, cherished family pets, staring down the barrel of your buddy’s gun. Violence is not your style, but it was the only way you could get through those doors. They reluctantly each give up their part of the combination and the massive doors swing open. What you see in front of you is just what The New York Times saw when it became the only media outlet ever to get a peek inside the vault. It said this, “Stacked from the floor 8 feet to the ceiling in a vault 6 feet wide and 12 feet deep were 36,236 bars, glistening in the half‐light.” A beautiful site to be sure. Now you just need to move 80,000 pounds of awkward gold bars into your carts, up and out of the vault, through the rest of the building, across your marked path through the minefield - watch your step- and load them into your truck. If each cart can carry roughly 1,000 pounds without breaking then that’s only 80 trips! So now you just need to hope that you can get the gold out and no signals of the breach have reached the authorities. And let’s not forget that most of these security measures we have talked about are mere speculation, there could be many more that we’re unaware of. But let’s just say you have beaten the system, and now it’s just some grunt work getting all the gold to the truck. When fully loaded you and your guys drive off into the sunset, hmm, let’s say sunrise. It’s better if the job is done at night. You are going to have to melt this gold down and then find a fence to get rid of it for you. Luckily you met a guy at the bowling alley the other month and he knows a guy who knows a guy who is buying a huge amount of gold. You heard his name was Gold-pinky or thumb or something like that. Job well done, give yourself a pat on the back. Of course the entire time you and your friends were doing this you have state of the art disguises on as well as full-body outfits which would prevent you leaving behind any trace of you and your friends’ DNA. As for the equipment used and the truck, well, let’s just say you met someone in the YouTube comments section who knows how to make inconvenient things disappear. Congratulations, you’re now an overnight billionaire! Now to retire and spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder wondering when the full weight of the US justice system and military will come crashing down on you. Okay, so we had to get pretty creative to figure out a way to break in to Fort Knox, but most hackers don’t have the same issue. The reality is that most people are incredibly vulnerable to having their personal information or accounts hacked and have no idea! No need to worry though, because Dashlane’s the one and only tool you need to keep your personal info and digital accounts safe and secure, and their Dark Web monitoring services will immediately notify you if it finds any of your personal information for sale on an online marketplace, so you can take steps to protect yourself right away! Don’t be like millions of victims every day, get Dashlane and keep your digital life secure right now! Head on over to www.dashlane.com/infographics for a free 30 day trial, and if you use the coupon code ‘infographics’ you can get 10% off a premium subscription today! But seriously, do you think after hearing this that it would be even remotely possible for someone to break into Fort Knox and steal the gold? Tell us in the comments. Also, if you do end up with a billion dollars, be sure to check out our other episode Spend $1 Billion Dollars In 24 Hours or LOSE IT ALL - CHALLENGE. Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe. See you next time.
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Channel: The Infographics Show
Views: 3,604,799
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Animated, Animate, Educate, Educational, Fort Knox, Gold, Money, Wealthy, Wealth, Rob, Robbers, Crime, Criminals, security, heist, fort, most secure, heavily guarded, guarded places, heavily guarded places, heavily protected, gold reserve, guarded, in the world, vault
Id: XIMd2tMOD5g
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 10min 13sec (613 seconds)
Published: Sat Aug 31 2019
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