Three of the thieves were stopped by police in a stolen BMW after their last raid, in which GB pound 25,000 was taken from a G4S van, outside a branch of Barclays in Baker Street, London.
The officers found those in the car to have dye staining on their clothes and hands which contained a unique SmartWater signature.
A fourth gang member was picked up by police when he used dye-stained bank notes at a bookmakers which were forensically linked to a robbery that had taken place days before.
The fifth member of the gang was arrested shortly afterwards.
When samples of their clothing were sent to SmartWater’s forensic labs its investigators were able to identify dye signatures from not only the latest raid, but three different stolen cash boxes, providing irrefutable evidence of their involvement in earlier crimes.
The gang was subsequently linked to five cash-in-transit robberies, between December 2010 and January this year.
The robbers were sentenced at Isleworth Crown Court on November 14, following a trial at the same venue on September 9 this year. The individuals and their sentences were:
– Conor Ryan, 19, from Brent, five years and nine months in a young offender institution
– Jerome Bishop-Taylor, 19, from Maida Vale, six years and eight months in a young offender institution
– David Carey, 25, from Westminster, six years and eight months imprisonment
– Arran Pope, 21, from Hammersmith, eight years in a young offender institution
– Unnamed 17-year-old, from Brent, four years and eight months in a young offender institution
SmartWater chief executive, Phil Cleary, said: “This sends one of the strongest possible messages to the criminal community that their chances of success in cash-related crimes are increasingly narrow.
“There is no escaping the forensic evidence SmartWater provides. In this case both the robbers’ own clothing and the bank notes tied them to multiple crimes which had a massive impact upon their sentencing.”
SmartWater is widely deployed across the cash handling industry, as well as being used to safeguard valuable metals throughout critical transport, telecoms and supply grid infrastructure in the UK and many other parts of the world.
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