Have you heard this one? There's some helpful advice being emailed around, for anyone who gets held up while withdrawing cash from an ATM. "I just found out that should you ever be forced to withdraw monies from an ATM machine, you can notify the police by entering your Pin # in reverse," one such email reads. "The machine will still give you the monies you requested, but unknown to the robber, etc, the police will be immediately dispatched to help you."
Like so much helpful advice from the Internet, this one isn't true. For one thing, what if your PIN is itself reversible, like 2772? That would cause some problems. Anyway, the Federal Trade Commission has reiterated that no banks have instituted a reverse-PIN warning system.
But there's a kernel of truth to the story: Back in 1998, a businessman in Chicago patented a system that would warn the police if someone typed their PIN into an ATM backward. But he hasn't gotten any banks to sign on to the system, and despite lobbying several states, he can't get any legislatures to push the system into law, either. As one Kansas banking official said: "I'm not sure anyone here could remember their PIN numbers backward with a gun to their head."
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