This story from CNN is fascinating but as usual the media only scratched the surface of the story. A criminal used a secret code and a prepaid bank card (to avoid detection) to trick the ATM machine into thinking that it is handing out $5 bills when it is actually handing out $20 bills. Pretty profitable scheme. It took 9 days for the crime to come to light and this happened only after some good samaritan admitted that she got more money than she should have.
What I would like to know is how many people used this machine before someone stepped up and reported the error. Maybe the story is not that some criminal with information about the operation of this machine managed to rip off the owner of the ATM but that it took 9 days to find an honest person. Another crazy question that begs to be answered, why would a company manufacture a ATM that allows the use of a code to trick the machine into dispensing the wrong bills? I know nothing about the programming for an ATM but this seems to render the lock on the vault of the machine useless.
2 responses so far ↓
mcwresearch.com » Electronic voting done before it started? // Jan 26, 2007 at 12:23 pm
[…] Here’s a story about someone who obtained and used a ‘backdoor’ code that, when used on the ATM tricked it into thinking it was delivering $5 bills when in fact it was delivering $20 bills. […]
Vance Blosser // Jan 26, 2007 at 12:30 pm
My wife used to have to refill ATMs at the bank. I believe she said the bills went into specific bins and the machine knew the value based on the bin it was in (I.E. the machine had no reader to actually determine the value of the bills).
The bins would then have values assigned to them by the bank. Years ago they used to handle $5 and $10 bills but inflation has caused most to generally use $20 bills. I believe this is why the ATMs have codes that allow reassignment of the values.
I would also say it is poor design to allow this to be input via the front panel, at least without some kind of other verification (physical key, etc. ).