In the heyday of American bank heists, a reporter was said to have asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks. “Because that’s where the money is,” Sutton famously answered, or so the story goes. Although Sutton later denied he ever said it, the quip went down in history. In fact, the truth behind the words has been employed to advise doctors to first look for the most obvious diagnosis, Sutton’s Law, and accountants to first target the biggest potential savings, the Willie Sutton Rule.

We do not now, nor ever have, condoned bank robbery as a profession, but we have to wonder what Willie Sutton would make of his old profession now. According to The Washington Post, bank robbery has taken a nose dive, dropping almost 60 percent in the past 25 years, according to the FBI. The agency says the average bank job take has slumped by over half in the last decade to $6,500. “Bank robbery is now largely a crime of the desperate,” a retired agent told the Post. It was never a walk in the park — recall the death scene in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde — but there was a time when bank robbers were folk heroes of sorts. Characters like Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger and Butch Cassidy each had more than 15 minutes of fame — although their celebrity often didn’t end well.

But banking is a different game today. Matters started changing in the 1990s when banks invested far more in security. Some now have bulletproof barriers, metal detectors at entrances and vestibules that can trap robbers. Security cameras are vastly improved, enabling law enforcement to share sharp images. The FBI even has an app to share photos and info about robbers on the lam.

And these days hackers with computers can outdo robbers with guns. In 2015, the take from about 4,000 bank robberies was $26.3 million, the FBI reports. In the same year, an internet security company figures, a single gang of hackers stole about $1 billion from banks around the world.

As we noted, bank robbery was never a social good, although it was good business for movies and tabloid newspapers. Sutton wrote an autobiography that attempted to explain what drew him to it. He wrote, “Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. I enjoyed everything about it so much that one or two weeks later I’d be out looking for the next job. But to me the money was the chips, that’s all.”

But that era appears to be on the wane. The internet and related technologies, which have disrupted many means of making a living, have even disrupted the life of crime.