Those of you that read last week’s column about the 90# cell phone scam and the ATM SafetyPin “gimmick” are in for a treat today.
I received many emails from people about both of them. Some people wrote to say that they had gotten the Urban Legends recently and wondered about their reality. Others wrote to say that they had heard about the ATM PIN trick before and thought it was totally true.
Well one email that I got really surprised me. It started out, “Hi Ron, I’m the guy who invented the ATM SafetyPIN.” Imagine my surprise? I wasn’t even greeted by, “I going to sue you if you don’t take back what you said about my product.” I have seen that phrase several times over the years.
Joe Zingher went on to say that he has a web site that would answer all of my readers and my questions. It is located at http://atmsafetypin.com. Take a look, and if you would like to you can contact Joe from there.
He went on to tell me that the system would cost about $10 million nationwide, or about $20-$25 per ATM. That doesn’t sound like to bad of a deal for what you get to me.
Joe told me that he was previously a patrolman and that the major benefit of this is that it can prevent crimes from even beginning. He has had the experience of being at the scene within 30 seconds of getting the call. Joe goes on to say that even if it were 30 minutes that would be much better than 30 days after the victim has disappeared. He told me that is sometimes part of the perpetrators plan. If the person is missing for a while the account will stay active for the criminals’ continued use.
He even has a fix to the palindromics issue I mentioned. A PIN of “2442″ becomes “4224″, which is called “Inside-OutPIN”. For the repeats like “8888″ you could use the “Plus 1-PIN” you add “1″ to each digit and the emergency number becomes “9999″.
Joe went on to say, “The Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police lobbied for two years and testified in favor of making the system mandatory.” He doesn’t think the banks appreciate it as they don’t want danger associated with the ATM industry. There are currently no official statistics on how often a forced ATM withdrawal occurs.
If you are interested in finding out more about ATM SafetyPINs feel free to contact Joe Zingher, Gurnee, Illinois, through his company, Zi Cubed Inc., at the site.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 5:22 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.