Daily · Dreamtime

And so ended the 53rd and final cash machine bombing of 2006, the year a toxic stew of joblessness, criminal ingenuity and readily available mine explosives gave rise to a startling new trend in crime-weary South Africa.

"Eeesh," said T.P.T. Supermarket's night guard, Alpheus Nevhundogwa, 49, as he recalled the attack. "These people, dangerous."

With their allure of easy cash, ATMs have long been a target for criminals worldwide, industry officials say. One popular tactic is to ram a truck into a cash machine so it can be dislodged, loaded onto the truck and driven away. Criminals in Europe have destroyed machines by injecting compressed gas into them until they explode. A Japanese gang once used a backhoe to steal an ATM from a railroad station. When the machine's remains were found nearly 30 miles away, $400,000 was gone.

But blowing up cash machines, especially as often as it has been done here in recent months, is a peculiarly South African crime, say industry officials and security experts, who attribute it to the unusual juxtaposition of First World banking conveniences and the kind of desperate poverty rarely found in developed countries. In few places in the world, global analyses show, is income distributed so unequally.

The attacks on ATMs in South Africa have grown in tandem with a politically driven push to install more machines in downtrodden areas where, under apartheid, modern banking was almost unknown. There are now 15,000 ATMs in the country, and the free-standing, steel-shed variety, such as the one blown up in Olievenhoutbosch on Dec. 31, are both increasingly common and especially vulnerable to explosives. No injuries or deaths have resulted, police say.

Blowing up an ATM is relatively easy in a country where a vast mining industry offers an endless supply of powerful explosives to steal. Both putty and sticks of dynamite have been used in attacks, though getting the amount and positioning right has proved elusive; most ATM bombings, police and security experts say, fail because the blast is either too weak to break loose the safe inside or so strong that the bills are ripped to shreds.

"They relatively seldom get their hands on the money," said Ian Janse van Vuuren of the South African Banking Risk Information Center, a nonprofit group that advises the industry on security issues. "They're still in the experimental phase."

Here in Olievenhoutbosch -- despite its bucolic name, meaning "olive tree grove," it is little more than a trading post amid the grassy sprawl of shantytowns and suburbs between Johannesburg and Pretoria -- the attackers were either luckier or more skilled than most.

Police are reluctant to discuss details of the bombings, or how much gets stolen, for fear of encouraging copycats. But the box the men here took almost certainly contained large stacks of cash. As is often the case in ATM explosions, the machine was loaded just the day before, witnesses said.

The cash machine also looks as if it was the victim of precision attack: The screen and keypad are dusty and damaged but intact. The card slot, a favorite place for bombers to deposit explosives, is broken open but hardly gaping. But the machine's innards, visible from a door in the back of the shed, are a jumbled mess of paper, twisted metal and charred plastic. An acrid stench lingers.

The seeming ease of the attack irritated and frightened shopkeeper Tsilige Phineas Tshetlo, 58, whose initials gave T.P.T. Supermarket its name.

He got a frantic cellphone call at 3 a.m. from the security guard. By the time Tshetlo, a bespectacled former builder, arrived in his truck, the scene was mobbed with police, he said. The cash machine and his market were blocked off by yellow tape.

Tshetlo was glad to learn that his store was undamaged. But business has since been down by 20 percent, he said, as would-be customers draw their cash from ATMs elsewhere and, as a consequence, don't step into T.P.T. He is eager to have the machine replaced quickly and upgraded with new security features.

"The engineer who designed this was very stupid," Tshetlo said as he punched a cash register from behind white-painted steel bars that separate him from customers and possible robbers.

One security measure used in other countries is a cartridge that, when a sensor detects an explosion, pours enough indelible ink onto the bank notes to make them unusable. Typically, central banks will swap those for clean bills, if the ATM operator presents the damaged ones with appropriate documentation.

Other new measures under consideration in South Africa may not please township shopkeepers or their customers. Proposals include placing fewer ATMs in poor, crime-ridden areas and limiting off-hours access to the most vulnerable cash machines with gates or bars, industry officials say.

Police, meanwhile, say they are making progress against several gangs believed to be responsible for the ATM bombings here. The South African Banking Risk Information Center reported 13 arrests related to the attacks, though the pace of explosions has not slowed. In the first two weeks of 2007, there have been six, including one outside a liquor store near T.P.T. supermarket last Tuesday and two others, farther away, in the early hours of Friday.

Even if new measures and a police crackdown reverse the trend, security experts say another crime spree almost certainly will replace it. Before blowing up ATMs became popular, the number of traditional bank robberies rose, then fell, as did the number of carjackings. Attacks on cash trucks surged several years ago, diminished, then surged again last year.

"Criminals are perhaps the most creative type of species you can find," said Johan Burger, a crime researcher at the Pretoria office of the Institute for Security Studies. "It is amazing how they keep finding ways to overcome obstacles