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Inventor has idea to limit ATM holdups

March 27, 2005

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Think of the four-digit PIN number for your ATM card.

Now, think of it with the four digits in reverse order.

The sobering question of whether that's something an average ATM customer could do under the stress of a robbery is at the core of a distinctly modern debate about bank-customer safety - a debate focused not on alarms and locks, but on software and psychology.

It's a debate that has also raised what should be a simple statistical question: Just how likely are you to get robbed at one of the nation's roughly 400,000 ATMs? Not even the banking industry can say - a data lapse that Joseph Zingher believes is intentional.

Zingher, a lawyer and inventor from Illinois, has patented a system that he said would give people a way to safely alert police when they're being robbed and ordered to make ATM withdrawals. The system would allow the user to enter the regular PIN number backward, which would dispense the money and look to the robber like a normal transaction - but would silently alert police to the robbery in progress.

The point isn't to stop the theft, Zingher said, but to ensure that the police are on their way, giving them that much of an earlier start in the pursuit if the robber abducts the customer. Such a system, he argued, could have saved the lives of, for example, three people in Kansas in 2002 who were abducted, forced to make ATM withdrawals and killed.

In addition to alerting police to the robbery, Zingher said, the system would give police all the information the bank has about the victim - which could include the victim's home address, car license number, and perhaps even a facial image - helping police in the search.

The industry has estimated that there are just 3,000 to 4,000 ATM holdups annually, a tiny sliver of the nation's roughly 12 billion total ATM transactions each year. But no one can prove or disprove those low ATM crime figures, because they're lumped in with all other types of bank robberies when the FBI compiles its annual data.

Zingher is pushing Illinois lawmakers for legislation that would require the state to collect data on how many ATM holdups happen in the state each year. He said such data would prove the banking industry was grossly underestimating the extent of the problem.

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