On film, they’re an essential tool for spies - Jason Bourne, for example, retrieved cash and passports from a Swiss box with the help of a device implanted in his hip - and a magnet for cunning thieves. Moviemakers love safe deposit boxes much more than bank executives do. “The larger the claim, the more likely they are to battle it for years.” McGuinn, the founder of Safe Deposit Specialists, an industry consulting firm. “The big banks fight tooth and nail, and prolong and delay - whatever it takes to wear people down,” said David P. The combination of lax regulations and customers not paying attention to the fine print of their box-leasing agreements allows many banks to deflect responsibility when valuables are damaged or go missing. But even when a bank is clearly at fault, customers rarely recover more than a small fraction of what they’ve lost - if they recover anything at all. Others allow children or spouses access to their boxes, and don’t realize that they have been removing things. People remove items and then forget having done so. Sometimes the fault lies with the customer. There are no federal laws governing the boxes no rules require banks to compensate customers if their property is stolen or destroyed.Įvery year, a few hundred customers report to the authorities that valuable items - art, memorabilia, diamonds, jewelry, rare coins, stacks of cash - have disappeared from their safe deposit boxes. There are an estimated 25 million safe deposit boxes in America, and they operate in a legal gray zone within the highly regulated banking industry. I had never known that one can have a feeling like that.” “I was never like that in my life before. He struggled to find the right words to describe the day he discovered his watches were missing. At age 67, he has a strong Polish accent and speaks English carefully. He paused in his retelling of the memory. Then, on April 7, 2014, he lifted the thin metal lid.

Every time he opened it, he saw the glinting accumulation of his life’s work. He separated a batch of personal effects - photographs, coins he had inherited from his grandfather, dozens of watches - into a box labeled 105. Poniz rented several additional boxes, and stored in them various items related to his work. The bank kept one the customer held the other. A foot-thick steel door sheltered cabinets filled with hundreds of stacked metal boxes, each protected by two keys. First National became First Union, which was sold to Wachovia, which was then bought by Wells Fargo. Over the next few decades, the bank - a squat brick building on a low-rise suburban street - changed hands many times.

In 1983, he signed a one-page lease agreement with First National State Bank of Edison in Highland Park, N.J., for a safe deposit box. The vault at his neighborhood bank seemed ideal. Poniz was an internationally known expert in the history and restoration of high-end timepieces.Īt first, he kept his personal collection in his house, but as it grew, he wanted something more secure. His hobby became his profession, and by the time of his relocation, Mr. He had been gathering unusual pieces since he was a teenager in 1960s Poland, fascinated by their intricate mechanics. In the early 1980s, when Philip Poniz moved to New Jersey from Colorado, he needed a well-protected place to stash his collection of rare watches.

Safebox with timer