No, entering your PIN backwards on an ATM will not notify the police

“If a thief forces you to take money out of ATM, don’t argue or resist. What you do is punch in your PIN backwards..Money will come out but will be stuck in the slot. The machine will immediately alert the local police without the robbers knowledge & begin taking photos of the suspect. Every ATM has the feature.”

This advice from a Facebook post, and other variants of it, some of which circulate in French and Arabic, is not true. The existence of the false tip itself predates Facebook, and once circulated via email chains, as this statement from the North Wales Police in the United Kingdom shows.

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Screenshot taken on May 31, 2019 of a false Facebook post

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Screenshot taken on May 31, 2019 of a false Facebook post

 

“It’s just some bad guys trying to get some attention on Facebook, it’s false,” Curt Binns, Canada executive director for the ATM Industry Association, a non-profit association that represents the ATM industry globally, told AFP about the post.

Although ATMs do not currently use the technology described in the false post, such a software does exists. In 1998, Illinois inventor Joseph Zingher patented a technology that would allow “the customers to alert the police that a crime is taking place without alerting the criminal.”

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Screenshot taken on May 31, 2019 of the SafetyPIN software patent

However, the banking industry never adopted the system, and Zingher was never able to profit from his invention, as this 2004 Forbes article described.

Binns recalled the early days of the software: “We heard about it, I vaguely remember dealing with it a while ago, but it didn’t get any traction then and it’s not getting any traction today.”

“We don’t have any ATMs that do this currently, but if there were any financial institution that were interested in the technology, it’s something that we would support,” Tiffini Bloniarz, senior manager for Diebold Nixdorf, the world’s largest ATM manufacturer, told AFP.

Bloniarz said  technology was never adopted in part because of “concerns that if an ATM user is trying to enter their pin backwards they might hesitate or fumble, when they’re under distress and possibly cause greater chance of violence.”

One in three ATMs globally is from Diebold Nixdorf, and the company covers 36 percent of the ATM market in the Americas, Bloniarz said, quoting the RBR Global ATM Market report.

Bloniarz said that she first encountered the rumor about the reverse PIN code system’s implementation about ten years ago. It continues to be shared despite debunks by fact-checking organizations including Politifact and Snopes.

EDIT: this article was updated on June 4, 2019 to include an Arabic version of this false news.