Original article (in Serbian) was published on 26/12/2020
For more than a decade, advice on what to do if someone forces you to withdraw money from a payment card at any ATM in Serbia has been shared in various online forms. The effectiveness of this advice was denied by 14 banks for FakeNews Tragac, confirming that by entering the reverse series of the PIN number, the ATM will not alert the police, nor will it pay the money you requested but the machine will consider such a PIN invalid.
The almost identical text has been recycled over the years through numerous posts on social networks and forums, blogs, internet presentations, as well as the media, and talks about how to protect yourself from a person who forces you to withdraw money from an ATM. It is stated that the PIN should be entered in reverse order (for example, if the PIN is 1234, then it should be entered 4321), after which the ATM will recognize this entry as a call for help: it will allow you to withdraw money, but it will also inform the police. The advice ends with a call to share this trick because “many people don’t know it” and the information that “this option exists at all ATMs”.
The editorial staff of FakeNews Tragac first contacted the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Serbia with a question whether this security procedure is true, i.e., whether all ATMs in Serbia really alert the police. Until the publication of this text, we did not receive an answer to several emails and calls we sent out, so in the meantime, we decided to contact all banks that operate on the territory of Serbia and ask them the same question.
We received 15 responses: one bank informed us that it did not own ATMs, while all the others disputed the veracity of this “security procedure”. The transaction does not pass authorization when entering the PIN in reverse order because the ATM recognizes it as an incorrect entry. Some banks confirmed that after three incorrect PIN entries in their ATM, the card gets blocked, while some were sure that this was a “myth in the payment card business” in Serbia, leaving room for this system to be applied somewhere in the world.
Before the end of last month, the Alo website published the disputed information, while in previous years, the same could be read on the Informer, Kurir, PCpress, Dnevne, Web-tribune, Webtribune.rs, Vesti.rs, Vestinet, Mediapress, Info-ks.net , Beo365grad, Bebac, Garevacki internet portal and Besno pile.