Determined crooks have used all sorts of methods to nab cash and run.

The Thomas Crown Affair Affair

With similarities to the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, a bank robber staged a daring heist in October 2008. Much like in the one that concludes the film, he used several human decoys to steal a ton of cash from a Bank of America in Monroe, Washington. Prior to the robbery, he placed an ad on Craigslist for road maintenance workers and told them to show up outside of the bank at 11 a.m. for a gig paying $28.50 an hour. Lots of recruits arrived wearing yellow vests, blue shirts and safety goggles. That’s when the robber slipped in among them wearing the same clothing. He then snuck up on a guard removing money from an armored truck, hosed him down with pepper spray, grabbed a bag of cash, and made a run for it. Even crazier: the crook escaped by floating down the Skykomish River in an inner tube. Authorities later found his “getaway vehicle” on a riverbank, but the robber got away with the crime.

The Townies

In the 2010 film The Town, a group of thieves rob a Boston bank while wearing some very creepy nun masks. The following spring, two crooks did the same thing in Illinois. The duo burst into a TCF Bank branch in Palos Heights just before closing time while dressed in masks based on the ones featured in the film. After jumping over the counters and forcing two staff members to enter the vault, they stuffed a bunch of cash into a Nike gym bag and quickly made their escape in a getaway car.

Using the Force

In 2010, a man dressed as the infamous Sith Lord strolled into a Chase branch on Long Island. After pointing a gun at a clerk, he managed to get away with a few stacks of cash. He was last spotted fleeing on foot through the bank’s parking lot. (A writer for the New York Post had a field day reporting on the robbery, employing lots of Star Wars references.) As security camera footage later revealed, the robber’s costume didn’t match up very well with the mechanical suit that Darth Vader wears in the films. He made do with a blue cape instead of a black one…and a pair of camouflage pants.