Nearly nine years after Joe Zingher patented the reverse PIN, his idea for protecting customers being robbed at automated teller machines has yet to catch on - except as an urban legend.
An e-mail that circulated late last year claims: "should you ever be forced to withdraw monies from an ATM machine, you can notify the police by entering your PIN # in reverse. The machine will still give you the monies you requested, but unknown to the robber … the police will be immediately dispatched to help you."
The passage describes Mr. Zingher's idea almost to a T.
It is also not true of any ATM today.
Like many rumors on the Internet, the e-mail spread rapidly, causing the New York State Banking Department to send out a consumer alert last month advising that reversing one's PIN while in danger of being robbed at an ATM will neither bring the police, nor spit out money from the machine.
Jim Fuchs, a spokesman for the department, said it has received about 25 calls on the matter in the past two weeks.
"We don't know the source, but this type of misinformation has a tendency to spread, hence our need to inform the public," he said.
Mr. Zingher, a former trial lawyer who lives in Gurnee, Ill., has been pitching the reverse-PIN concept to banks and state legislatures for years.
Aside from receiving the patent in March 1998, his only brush with successful implementation of the concept came in August 2003, when the Illinois General Assembly passed a law requiring that all ATM operators install reverse-PIN software in their machines.
But the requirement was never enforced, and a year later the law was changed to make installation optional.
In an interview last week, Mr. Zingher said he did not start the rumor, but said he suspects that articles published about the reverse-PIN concept over time became passed along by word-of-mouth. The story has migrated around the globe, with versions of the idea spreading as far as New Zealand and Australia, he said.
"It captures people's imagination. And human nature being as it is, people filled in the gaps with supposition. People supposed it's been done, and that's how it all got started."
Mr. Zingher came up with the reverse PIN back in 1989, when he was withdrawing money from an ATM that was located in a seedy section of town.
He was not held up or harassed, but he says that the experience gave him the idea of somehow using a manipulated version of the PIN as a way to call for help.
In Georgia last year, State Sen. John Wiles, R-Kennesaw, sponsored a bill that would have required the use of a reverse PIN as a security measure. But the bill was never assigned to a committee, and died, said Merri Brantley, the director of the Georgia Senate's press office. Ms. Brantley said the bill would have to be reintroduced this year.
The reverse-PIN concept faces skepticism in the banking industry.
Tom Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase & Co., gave a litany of problems with the reverse PIN: "There's a lot of logistical factors that could be a problem. Can the police handle it? Can they get there in time to make a difference? What about false alarms? What about people whose PINs are the same forward and backwards, like 1221?"
John Hall, a spokesman for the American Bankers Association, said that, though the Washington lobby group would "support any legislation or new technologies that will make ATMs safer," he questioned whether the reverse PIN might do more harm than good.
"Would someone be able to remember their number under duress, and could that hesitation actually cause them harm?" Mr. Hall said.
Mr. Zingher said he did not believe the e-mail rumor would hurt his cause.
"Anything that raises the issue is going to help me, even if it's a false claim," he said. "Too many people recognize how easy it would be to do this."
