A Bank Robbery Failed Because the Thief Had Terrible Handwriting

If you ever wondered why all the grownups in your life insisted that you learn how to write legibly as a child, here’s the cold hard truth. It’s because they wanted to ensure that if you ever grew up to try to rob a bank by slipping a bank teller a threatening note, they’d be able to understand what they were reading.

Sadly, it’s a lesson that an attempted bank robber from Loveland, Colorado learned the hard way.

This Guy Tried to Rob a Bank a Failed Because His Handwriting Sucked

On December 17, 2024, a man entered a First National Bank a little before 5 PM holding a handwritten note. It’s a classic bank-robbing tactic. It’s an attempt to make a way with as much money as the robber can without making a scene.

The problem was, the bank robber’s handwriting was atrocious. Completely illegible. Chicken scratch if the chicken were trying to scratch while riding a roller coaster. The poor teller probably couldn’t, uh, tell, what was going on. You have to imagine that if you’re the bank telling business, they tell you the telltale signs of bank robberies. Being handed a note by a silent patron is probably one of them.

The teller’s inability to make heads or tails of what was written on the note so frustrated the bank robber that he abandoned the whole idea and left without stealing so much as a penny.

I can just imagine the teller squinting while moving the note further and closer hoping distance will clarify the nonsense, perhaps leaning over to the tellers to their left and right to ask “Does this say ‘can I have some honey’?” To which another teller would reply, “No, no, no. It says, ‘I love the Sunday funnies.’ I do too, sir. That Dilbert is a real hoot.”

The man has not yet been captured, even though the Loveland Police Department knows exactly what he looks like thanks to the security camera that was pointed directly at his head, situated maybe only a foot away from the tip of his nose.

Perhaps the unwritten rules of “no harm, no foul” should probably be brought into play here. As someone with atrocious handwriting, the embarrassment of handwriting something meaningful that a reader cannot read is so embarrassing it’s probably punishment enough.