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Some bank security professionals tired of seeing surveillance images that look like this are asking customers to remove hats and sunglasses upon entering banks. Others are finding that they can reposition cameras to minimize the effect a hat would have.

There is an old adage that desperate times call for desperate measures, and as more people have fallen into financial despair during these tough economic times, some have resorted to robbing banks to make ends meet.

Of course, most bank robbers don't enter with Halloween masks and guns blazing, but rather choose to keep a low profile by wearing a disguise and either calmly speak to a teller or pass them a threatening note with cash demands. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's bank crime statistics for 2007, a weapon was only used in 30 percent of robberies nationwide. Most robberies were carried out via a note or oral demands.

To combat this, many banks have decided to implement a no hats and sunglasses policy at its branches, hoping that it will deter a majority of would be thieves.

One bank that has recently implemented this policy with success is Houston-based Sterling Bank, which has more than 60 branches throughout the state of Texas.

According to Jack Harris, director of corporate security and investigations for Sterling Bank, the bank began to see an increase in robberies at its branches last spring. Harris said that the bank, which on average suffered between two and three robberies a year, ended 2008 with total of 10 for the year.

"We were looking at a way to implement different things to hopefully deter those robberies, and of course we looked at all types of things, be it security devices, different setups for the banking centers, etc. One of the things we found through our research was that some jurisdictions in some states were using this (no hats and sunglasses policy) for customers or non-customers who were coming into the bank," he said. It wasn't just for bank robberies... but it also in effect also helps deter check fraud and ID theft."

In implementing this new policy, however, Harris said that there were multiple factors that had to be taken into consideration before it went bank wide this year.