I was emailed this bit of news today but I don’t believe it - can anyone vaildate?
PIN NUMBER REVERSAL (GOOD TO KNOW)
If you should ever be forced by a robber to withdraw money from an
ATM
machine, you can notify the police by entering your Pin # in
reverse.
For example if your pin number is 1234 then you would put in 4321.
The
ATM recognizes that your pin number is backwards from the ATM card
you
placed in the machine.
The machine will still give you the money you requested, but
unknown to
the robber, the police will
be immediately dispatched to help you.
This information was recently broadcasted on TV and it states that
it is
seldom used because people
don’t know it exists.
What if your pin number is something like: 9009. You’d be notifying the police every time you accessed your account.
Very good point. Right there proves it is not true. Thanks.
I used to work for a bank and we had several states try to pass legislation to have either reverse pins or dedicated emergency pins mandated for such occasions.
None of them ever passed, reverse pins for the obvious palindromes and emergency pins because people these days have so many pins and so many passwords for everything that mandating emergency pins would drive people nuts.
There was an attempt in the 1990’s to make this happen and it was presented to a few states but the bill stalled.
The banks were not keen on the idea for a few reasons. First (and probably only one they really cared about) was that the technology would be expensive, then they argues the # of incidents where someone held a gun to your head to steal your money was rare and the cost was not justified and finally, they said that if someone did indeed have a gun to your head, you are probably hard pressed to even remember your PIN, let alone, enter it backwards.
It is at this point, not in existence and most likely never will be.
While obviously not totally safe, seems to me with the abundance of ATM machines inside convience stores, supermarkets, superstores, as well as cashback on debit transactions, not sure why anyone would use an exposed, outside ATM machine anymore?