Diversion Safes More Than Meets the Eye
As opposed to their conventional cousins, diversion safes can be used for hiding things as much as safekeeping them.
Or even, to put it more succinctly, they secure by trying to hide.
In the spirit behind the old adage that the best defense is a good offense, this sort of safe works not by brawn but by brains, so to speak.
Indeed, their construction almost always offers no tamperproofing capabilities whatsoever.
That’s because diversion safes are created out of otherwise everyday objects, almost everything from bottles and candlesticks to electrical wall outlets and every commonly carried coins!
Therefore, given these realities, this type of safe is not really “safe” in the traditional way often thought possible of a safe.
They are not meant to withstand tampering but to escape it by not drawing any attention at all.
For that reason, they are also commonly known as as hidden safes, though technically speaking the safe isn’t generally hidden in any way; indeed, their performance comes from being right out in the open!
They’re also oftentimes called by the more general term of concealment devices, particularly in connection with cases of espionage.
Common illustrations include suitcase with false bottoms and hollow fountain pens.
Coins were also used, made most popular by the Hollow Nickel Case wherein a paper boy inadvertently discovered just such an object.
During the early summer of 1953, Brooklyn newsie Jimmy Bozart was paid with a nickel that seemed too light.
Being a Brooklynite, the fourteen year-old was nobody’s dummy and tested his doubts by dropping the coin, whereupon it popped open on the ground to expose its contents.
Jimmy told a friend who was the daughter of a New York City police officer who of course told her day who informed a detective who went on to tell an FBI agent….
It turned out that the coin comprised microfilm with an undecipherable series of numbers.
Four years would move prior to a fecting Soviet spy finally solved the mystery: it was simply a coded greeting to a freshly arriving KGB officer!