TechStuff Classic: TechStuff withdraws from an ATM

that bugs you, my bad. But otherwise enjoy this classic episode, which originally published on November two thousand eleven. They say the best things in life are free. You're such a card. Today we're going Today we're gonna talk about automated teller machines or a t M senes. Oh, we'll also be talking about personal identification numbers or pen numbers. Five people just paused the podcast so that they could write us an angry email about the redundancy. They probably also went

ahead and unsubscribed. Possibly yeah, but we in case, just for you people who have those pet peeves, and I totally understand. I'm not sharing. I share those pet peeves. I am not criticizing. You may very well hear me say a t M machine and or PEN number at least once in this podcast as a way and and not not in a way to needle you. Just that's it's it's stamped in my brain that way. Well, pen number two is also a little bit more useful than a t M machine since pen is also a pin.

Do you have your pen? Yeah? Right, no number exactly? Do you have your personal identification numbers? So, yes, we're talking about a t M S today, and we've had a few people asked us about how a t m S work. We assume it was all on the up and up, not to find out how they work so that you can exploit them. I did find out an article about how to hack into one. Wow. Well, and that gets a little complicated. We'll talk about that. Why that is in the case, Um, yeah, because it really

does depend. But first let's talk about how a t M S came to be. That's somewhat in dispute. Yes, um, there there are multiple people who were inventing things that resemble what a t M S are today in different parts of the world around the same time, although the earliest one I could find was from a Mr. Luther sim Jean Yes who was born in Turkey. It was a son of Armenians who were sadly his family was was broken up during a genocide in the early twentieth century,

and he uh. He eventually immigrated to the United States and he came up with an idea that eventually he called the bank matic Automated teller machine. So that's where we get a t M. That's he's the one who came up with the term. And this was around nineteen nine. But this was it doesn't really resemble the way a t M s look and and act now, But it was an idea of a of an of machine that would dispense money. And it was run for a six month trial at the City Bank of New York, which

we now call City Bank yes uh. And after the six months the trial ended and City Bank decided not to extend the trial, not to implement it, and um, at least according to one source I read, the reason behind it was that it just didn't get a lot of traction the people. People just didn't want to use a machine to interact with their bank accounts. They preferred to have a person to person interaction in a bank and um, apparently the people who were using it were

a bunch of air dwells. Yeah, I read about that too. Basically, they they the idea of being that the only people who would not want to talk to a teller are the people who would prefer that you didn't know they were depositing or withdrawing money in the first place. Yeah, so we're talking about people with ill gotten game gamblers for example, places where gambling was not legal, and um, you know, you might not want to have to answer tricky questions like how did you come upon this sum

of money, my good man? Yes, yes, exactly. So. Anyway, that was the first recorded incidents I could find of someone trying to create an a t M Yes, and again it was it was an interesting experiment that ultimately failed at that time. Yeah. Now, a lot of what I read about the early days of a t M S, UM, they weren't a t M S. They didn't function like today's machines do. UM. In some cases you needed a special card that wasn't actually tied to your your bank account.

In fact, a lot of them used credit cards instead. UM. For a long time credit cards were looked down upon, UM, but some of them use special vouchers or coins. Yes and yeah, And in Britain you had to UH on one of the early trials, you had to go inside and get a voucher. You would get a ten pound voucher. So if you wanted fifty pounds, you have to get

five vouchers. That would you take outside of the machine, Which raises the question why would you not just go and withdraw the money directly while you're there, unless, of course, you just wanted the convenience of being able to get at ten pounds at any given time in the future.

And I guess that's the argument you'd have to make, Like, instead of walking out the bank with fifty pounds, which you know you may or may not need at that time, you could have uh five ten pound vouchers, and then as the as you go about your business throughout the coming day, as you realize, oh, I need some more walking around money or getting about money, as I like to say, you would go and use one of those

vouchers to get some more money out. But it did seem to decrease the convenience factor of the automated teller machine somewhat. But yeah, in this case, you wouldn't need a card with stuff and coded on it. You would just need your voucher to put in and then it would spit money out. It became like a money vending machine. Yeah. Yeah, and uh in night in Britain there was a several banks use the device UM that would use a card, but not a card that you always carried with you.

It basically worked like the voucher. You'd stick the card in the machine, you get your money out, and the machine would keep your card, which is kind of a pain in the neck. Yeah, it's kind of what happens to you now when your machine eats your card and uh, yeah, I've had that happen too. That's not a good feeling, is it, um, Yeah, except this time in this case

we're talking about doing it on purpose. Uh yes. So some of the other players in this space, and this mainly the real development of a t M S beyond the early nineteen nine example took place in the sixties. So you had people like James Goodfellow, who he secured a patent on an a t M like machine in nineteen sixty six. He also came up with the idea of storing a personal identification number on a magnetic strip that would be printed on the back of a card,

so that would become the A t M card eventually. Uh. They had also John D. White, who invented a free standing automated teller machine. A lot of these other machines were built into the corner of a building. It was actually part of a larger structure. Um. This was more

of a free standing um A machine. Uh. And then there's John Shepherd Baron, who I think I think most sources I saw credited him as the true father of the A t M. Really, yeah, John Shepherd Baron, because he was the guy who created the first real fully electronic automated teller machine and uh, and the very first one was installed in Barclays Bank in London in nineteen

sixty seven. But you also had Don wet Cell. Now he was working in America and his machine started coming out around nineteen sixty eight, and he was known to have worked at least in part on Shepherd Baron's work as well. He kind of took Shepherd Baron's work and then uh change things like enhanced things and drop some things and included other things, so uh sort of used

as a launching point for his own work. So you get a lot of conflicting information about who is really the inventor of the A t M. I think part of it depends on where you're from. If you're from England and it's John Shepherd Baron, Yeah, and uh um the National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian recognized wet cell Um and this kind Penny Docutel, which was a baggage handling company UM as the people who created the

A t M. So it's yeah, I guess you. Like I said, it all depends on who you ask, sort of like television, yeah, or radio. Yeah, they're like many other inventions. There's uh the story, the real story is far more complicated than just a factoid that you'll find in a history book. Yeah. Now, I was gonna say. Now, even though in the sixties, UM A t m s became a lot more common, banks started as uh including

them as part of their services. UM. As a matter of fact, Uh, the Fortune article I read by Ellen Florian Um and uh Doris Burke and Jenny Murrow basically was saying that they quoted a chemical bank advertisement and said um on September two, our bank will open at nine o'clock and we'll never close again. And that was the Rockville Center branch at ten North Village Avenue on

Long Island. Yeah. The idea being that, of course, you could access your account at any time and make withdrawals or transfers or whatever without having to go into the bank. Because of course, the reason why people are coming up with this in the first place was for convenience, because

bank hours are notoriously um short. Yeah, that will people talk about bankers hours, where you know, in order to actually go and visit the bank, you might have to take time out of your work day in order to you know, and then you have to go inside a bank and stand in line. See for some of our listeners, this is going to sound completely foreign to them. Yeah, because apart from maybe opening up a bank account or perhaps going in for a loan or something like that,

you just don't have to do that anymore. Yeah, I mean, if you want to do the day to day stuff, depositing a check, finding out how much money you have in the bank, making withdrawal, maybe even transferring money between accounts, you can do all that in an a t M. Yeah, it's some cases you can do some of that through online banking as well. So we've we've almost completely eliminated

the need to go into a physical space. But back in the day, it used to be that if you wanted to do anything to do with your money, you had to go and stand in line and wait to talk to a teller and then they pull up your records and do you do all that in person, face to face. And actually in the sixties, back when uh, back when these were launching again, the people weren't flogging to them immediately. There were In fact, some banks were a little skeptical that people would ever want to interact

with a machine as opposed to a human. They thought that the human interaction was a key component of the banking process. And it really wasn't until the eighties that A t M s started to truly take off. Well, the Fortune article actually has a particular event that they credit with the takeoff of the A t M And what might that be. Well, as it turns out, it took Mother Nature's involvement to spur people to use the A t M. According to them, it's not nice to

fool Mother Nature. No, Chris and I will tell you more about A t M S in just a second, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. In January in New York they got seventeen inches of snow, which slowed business to a crawl because a lot of places couldn't open. And they said, um, again this is citing the Fortune article. Um. There was a commercial that City Bank released saying, UM, you know, hey, you can

use these machines anytime, whether the bank's open or not. Uh. And they had a new tagline, the City Never sleeps um, and it said, Um, I see what they did there, The machine used increase during the storm in uh city banks market share in New York City deposits had doubled, and so the rest of the banks moved to catch up. And that basically started a revolution, at least in New York. Um. Of course that's a lot of people, so that that

can affect things. And people go in there and see how people are using the A t M S and they go back home, you know. Yep. Yeah, And like I said, in the eighties, that really started to take off. So I guess now we can finally start getting into what makes up an a t M and how they how they actually work. Uh. Now, part of this involves the way that we access the A t M s uh.

And and not just with the key the keypad or the touch screen, depending upon the model that you're using, but the card you have, your A t M card, whatever you're using to access the A t M. And there are variations on this, but all of them have a a magnetic stripe or mag stripe on them. And uh, you might say, well, what the heck is a magnetic stripe? Well, it's kind of what sounds like it's a uh, it's it's a plastic like film. It's on the back of your card that has lots and lots and lots of

tiny iron based magnetic particles. Yes, as a matter of fact, it's very similar, if not nearly identical to the material that they used to use in recording tape cassette tape cassette tapes, real to real tapes, eight track tapes, also floppy disks. Yeah, the material inside there, I mean, it's even most of them are even the same brownish color. Right. And the way you right to this strip is that

you you magnetize these little particles. Each of the particles acts like its own bar magnet right, and you magnetize them to either have a north or south pole direction on each part article and so that's like bits, zeros and ones. So by creating them in either a north or south pole direction, and then you you've got thousands

of these right, and in one strip. You can encode information that way, and that information is going to have things like the the account number on it, so that it has you know, it's able to say this card belongs to this account. Uh. It may also have the pen on their the personal identification number, so that you can have that as sort of a key pass entrigue.

You know, as long as the pen that you enter into the A t M matches the one that's on the card and in the account, as long as all three of those are are the same, then you'll be

able to access your information. So that's on your card, which means of course that the A t M has to have some sort of card reader involved, which you know it's a magnetic stripe reader that you know, depending on the style of the A t M, it maybe one where you put your card in and it sucks it into the machine and you hope when your transactions over it will spit it back out again. Or what I see most commonly now are the kinds where you

swipe it. You either have a vertical swipe where you just swipe the card down the side of a little reader, or you inserted into a slot and pull it back out again quickly. And in either case, the what happens is those little magnets go past a detector because the magnets are in motion, the detector detects the difference of the magnetism on each of those little bars and can

read that as whatever the information is. Yeah, so all the information that's printed on the card, um the number that's embossed in the card in your name, the machine is not reading or looking at any of that stuff. It's taking everything from the magnetic stripe. Which is why you should not put your your credit cards or a T M S cards or anything like that near powerful magnets, right because that could actually realign those little magnetic particles

inside the film. And some people call it de magnetizing, but really it's just realigning those polls so it no longer it might spout out gibberish now when you when you swipe it, or anyway, it's not going to correspond with your information and suddenly your card doesn't work anymore. Yeah, you can also find the same thing if you've used it too much or if the magnetic stripe gets damaged in some way. Um. You know, some people say the

eel skin wallets. Yeah, I hear that a lot, because you know, and there are a lot of different theories about Actually the theory I've heard that seems to explain it the most, or it seems to be the most logical to me. Eel skin wallets some people claim came from electric eels and that somehow has some sort of electric impulse still stored in it, and that's what's screwing up the cards. Count me skeptical on that one exactly.

But a lot of these have a magnetic clasp so that when you close it it it remains closed, and the magnetic clasp depending on how your card is, how you're storing your card in the wallet, Um, the stripe might be close enough to the magnetic class that the magnetic class is is realigning those magnetic particles in the film, So don't do that. Well. Yeah, so once that, uh, you're you have the magnetic card reader. We've talked about

that and and basically the information is going into a computer. Yeah, very basic CPU inside every a t M and in fact a lot of them run Windows. Yeah, which we'll get to. The earlier A t M s were all proprietary. Oh yeah, Now that was when if you had an account with UM Bank something, you know, First National Bank, and you wanted to go to Second National Bank, you were on your own. You have to find an a t M for with First National Bank or you are

out of luck because your card wouldn't work. The system wasn't compatible. However, it all so meant that those A t M s had the benefit of security through obscurity. That's true because UH would be thief would have to focus on a particular type of a t M and the things that might work on that a t M would not necessarily work on a t M s for other banks, So it's somewhat limited the liability and the

vulnerability of those machines. Once the machine started to move toward more computer based operating systems like Lennox and Windows, then you opened up new opportunities for thieves to target specific parts of the A t M infrastructure, and UH and made it in some ways more vulnerable than the

older models. Now I say that, but the truth is you can actually find these older model A t M s on plenty of sites like eBay, where you could buy an A t M if you wanted to, and if your goal was to deconstruct, to hack this a t M so you would learn how it works, you could potentially find vulnerabilities in that system to exploit. Don't do that, it's illegal. You don't want to do that, but there that That is one of the downsides to the old systems too, is that, you know, it's not

like these things were. It's not like you had to have a license to own one. You know, you just had to buy one. So you just had to find someone willing to sell one and then you can buy it. So, yes, you've got your CPU in there. Uh. However, the A t M is not its own standalone UM machine like that. It's not that it's it's disconnected from the outside world. No, but if you if you think about it, it's it's very much like the computer that sits on your desktop

or laptop. So you've got a screen for customer, uh for basically an output device. You've got a printer that prints out. You've got an input device or maybe two. You might have a touch screen. You might have a key pad to type in members or both um and hopefully both for those of people who have vision impairments, right right. And then you also have uh basically an

internet connection. It may be on a private network. It might be some kind yeah, very it might be a closed off private connection, but it goes to a whatever bank is behind that particular a t M. Yeah, it'll have a network connection of some type to communicate with a a server somewhere that has account information on it. So if you have three dollars in your account you want to withdraw twenty dollars, it will say, okay, well Jonathan's got three dollars, so I can give him twenty dollars.

And he's withdrawn twenty dollars, so it makes a note of that in the account, so it says, now he has two left. Yeah. The way this works is that so you can think of the especially the older a t M s um, we're really thin clients. Yeah they were, they were. You know. The the had essentially enough power for it to read the rip to uh uh to two allow you to input your pen and to display the information. But then what it would do is the terminal that you're using would connect to a host processor.

Now this would be a computer that belongs to whatever financial institution again is owns that a t M. Now, if that's your bank, then that's pretty much where this ends. It goes, it refers to your account. Make it confirms that you that you are who you say you are, and that at least according to your pen and that you have the funds that you require in order for you to get whatever it is you're asking. So again like in your example, that that you have at least

twenty dollars you can withdraw um. And then it will send the information back to the machine that you're at and either confirmed that it can dispense the cash or deny it, and then the machine does whatever it's supposed to do. Uh, if your bank is a different bank, than why happens is the it will go to the

host processor. The host processor will then route that request to the specific financial institution that you belong to and get the permission there, and then your bank essentially will wirelessly transfer funds to the financial institution and charge of that a t M, and then that financial institution will allow the a t M to dispense cash because the money has been you know, it's not losing money, it's

had the wireless transfer from your bank. This is also why you'll find a lot of a t M s have those fees on them, yes, the usage fees, because otherwise, you know, it's just an access thing that you know, banks are doing out of the goodness of their hearts. But these are bankers. We know they don't have that, right bankers and lawyers right, So um, hey, I I watched the documentary at Christmas, Carol, I know how this works.

So so in order to make money off of these transactions, that's why you have that usage fee, because you know it's going to charge you for the whole process of having the money transferred from your financial institution to the bank. And depending upon the way that the different financial institutions operate, you might actually have multiple fees on one transaction, which

is really irritating. Yeah, that's when you get the fee from the second national bank from using it's a t M, and then the fee from the first national bank for wirelessly transferring the money to second national bank. You should

have used our a t M. Yeah, that's that's terrible. However, one of the bright sides of using a t M S is that if you're in a foreign country and you're using your card, it's automatically making the change exchange, and it usually makes that exchange at a like you know, normally, if you go into a financial institution to exchange currency from one format to another, there's a fee placed on top of that. So yes, so you're not going to get a a perfect exchange from whatever currency you're using

to whatever you need. You're gonna have some of that money taken out. But usually if you're using an a t M in a foreign country, you you tend to get one of the You normally get a really favorable rate. You know, it won't be as dramatic as it would be if you were to go into some money changing place anyway, getting off topic here, So, uh, that's the process going on behind the scenes. Now, when the money is actually coming out, how does the A t M

know that it's giving you the right amount of money? Well, it has to. Basically, it has cassettes in there with the different bills. So assuming that things are lined up correctly, assuming that the person who's loaded the a t M has done so in the proper way, then it should

be dispensing the right number of bills. Now it also goes by thickness, so it should be able to tell um, if you are getting say two bills out, let's say two twenties you want, um, then it should be able to go, okay, there are two, because I can tell

by the thickness of these bills. Yeah, um, So yeah, you've got You've got a couple of different types of sensors inside the a t M. There's usually an electrical eye sensor, some sort of optical sensor that is optically verifying that the the denominations that are being dispensed match what you asked for. We have a little bit more to talk about as far as a t M s go, but before we get there, let's take another quick break

to thank our sponsor. If it's supposed to be doing it one bill at a time, and the thickness sensor says, wait a minute, that's too thick for it to be one bill, it will send that particular bill, or a pair of bills, or whatever it happens to be to a reject been inside the A t M. So the A t M has has a bend that collects rejects, and this can also be bills that are worn or torn. If if it detects that, that's going to send it

to the reject ben. Uh. And so the ben is just gonna keep collecting bills that get rejected through this process. And it's all taking just a few seconds. So you know, you might be waiting a little bit but thinking like whatever, well, I mean, while the machine is making sure that it's

dispensing the right number and denomination of bills to you. Um. There's also an electronic journal that's part of an a t M, so that it's recording every transaction that's happening with that machine, and it also records whenever any bill gets sent to the reject been. And that way, when someone comes into service the machine, either to refill it or to fix it or whatever, they can take a look at the journal and see, uh, you know, how frequently are is the reject been getting a bill sent

to it. If it's happening a lot, that might mean that either the sensors need to be adjusted or that the feeding mechanism needs to be adjusted so that it's no longer pulling more than one bill at a time, or in might mean that the actual bills that are being put into the machine are of two. They're not they're not fresh enough that you know that something needs

to change. This one's a little stale, yeah, exactly, because too many of them are going into the reject ben So so it's got built built in error correction if you will. Yeah, it's and and some of that again is mechanical, and some of it's just saying, hey, stop putting crappy money in me because I can't give it to anyone. And the bank's like, but we don't want to give money to anyone, And then they twirl their mustaches and leap into a giant vault full of gold coins, which,

by the way, hurts. I don't know how Scrooge McDuck did it, No man, I I scratched that one off my bucket list, and then I also broke an arm, so not. I do not recommend it. However, if you invest tuppence um so yeah, that birds um so Yeah. I mean it is basically um a computer with a couple's special sophisticated um ways to handle error correction. Oh and I also wanted to mention that the journal. The

journal sort of serves two purposes. One, it helps keep track of what's going on with the machine, so that can you you could see the machines working correctly. Also provides an accounting uh in case there's ever any dispute about what the machine was dispensing or whether there was a question about um, how the machine was used out of course, now, UM A t M s also usually have some kind of security camera UM nearby, just to

watch that people are who they say they are. Yeah, so you can match up the the time on the security camera with the time that was listed in the journal and go back and review footage. Uh if someone has if any of you out there have ever had your card number and and pen stolen so that someone else has accessed your account through an a t UM you realize, of course this would be a really important feature.

I'm one of those people, by the way. Yeah, well that's actually that was but my bank was very good at letting me know, and it was very proactive in making sure that that got fixed. So yeah, yeah, now

that's that's true. These uh, these machines are sophisticated and and specialized, but they're also uh in some ways not so sophisticated that they can't be fooled or not not necessarily fooled, but UM also that other people can come along and take information by using devices such as skimmers, which can be put over the card reader UM and basically it is usually a very slim uh compact device that can read the magnetic strip on there on the card.

So basically what happens is if if a scammer has installed a skimmer on an A t M, when you put your card through it, both the skimmer and the A t M are reading the card number. Now the pin block them. In the United States, federal regulations require that the pin block, which is the four digit pin uh information UM, must be encrypted when it's sent along.

So UH to some degree, you would be protected if just your number was going through the skimmer, because you would need the pin block encrypted, you know, and it's encrypted on the card, so it can't the machine has to decipher that. The skimmer can't do that. So what the scammers do. They will they will install a very tiny camera. You know, cameras are teeny tiny these days. You know, we've got them in our smartphones and other types of phones. UM they're sitting on top of our

laptops and and and computers because they're so small. UM. People can in small, in small, install a small camera right above the area where the you type in your number,

and then they'll they'll record your keypad punches. And then what they'll do is they'll match the keypad punch to the information that they've ski MMed off your card and then they've got essentially your card number and your pen all in one place and can then access money from your account at any a t M. And a lot of cases too, they don't try to take as much

as they can get. A lot of cases, UM, banks that I know of here in the United States will give you a maximum amount of day, usually something like three per day. UM. A lot of times these scammers won't do that. They'll take out twenty dollars and the idea being that be harder to detect. Yeah, well I must have. I must have taken out I don't remember what I what that was, But it wasn't that much.

It wasn't like somebody was scamming me. Although if you do, if you're which this, by the way, is why it's important for you to review your your bank statements on a regular basis, uh, because you may notice that you're withdrawing money from places that you are not physically at, like Los Angeles or something when you're not in l A. If you're in l A and you see that you were drawn from l A, you may very well have

been the person who have done that. I don't mean to say that any withdrawal from l A is obviously fraudulent, right people who people everything's on it? Does this mean I have to drive to San Jose if I want to withdraw money, Yes, that is what I meant. Um. There are some some people working on newer types of verification technology. I saw one they're trying out in Poland, which is using biometrics. They do a scan of your

finger and they don't use your fingerprint. They're looking at the veins in your finger which is pretty smart because again fingerprints, you can lift a fingerprint and you can fake fingerprint readers. It. The more sophisticated the detection device, the less likely someone's going to go through all the trouble to um to fool it, because it is a lot of I mean, it takes a lot of investment just to get the stuff too to be able to

fool these devices. But yeah, if you wanna, fingerprint is not full proof because you could lift a print off of something and then create a late x print. Uh, and fool some machines using that. We've seen that happen before. Um. There's also I know you mentioned the cameras, but we should also mention some uh. Some skimmers will also use a fake keypadah, which is essentially a key logger that's

logging up pen entries. So if you ever walk up to an a t M and it looks like parts of the machine don't match up exactly like the it's just a different coloration or made out of a different material, and it just looks a little odd, that's a warning sign. Doesn't necessarily mean that a skimmer has hit that machine. It may just be that that particular machine was manufactured in an odd way. But anything that looks a little out of place should be a big red flag to you.

And uh. And I would highly recommend that if you do notice something when you walk up to an a t M, uh that's like that that you find a different one, don't use that one. Yeah, And and keep in mind where it is to the more isolated A t M s are more likely to be the ones that UH scammers are going to target because they will be easier to modify. UM, because this stuff takes a little bit of time and effort, and if you're doing

it in a high traffic area, someone's gonna notice. Yeah. Like, for example, the the A t M s that you might see in a popular gas station, UM are a whole lot likely, a whole lot more likely to be okay, because if a cashier is standing right across from it all day long, it's unlikely that a scammer is going to have the time to install those devices without getting caught doing hey what are you doing, or something like a busy airport where there's a lot of security already there.

I mean, it's just it's such a it would be such a high risk endeavor that it would you know, you look at risk versus reward from a thief standpoint, to be less likely to be hit. That's not saying that some enterprising thief hasn't tried it, no, no, but but it's less likely. Yeah. Well, in fact, we've had a we had a rash here in the Atlanta area not terribly long ago where people were knocking over a t M S with their cars and just taking the

a forklifts or bulldozers. Yeah, yeah, because it's easier to add to crow bar your way into one than bother trying to Because we didn't mention the part of the a t M is it's a safe. Yeah, you know it's there's a safe that's inside these machines. That's where all the money is kept in a vault, in a safe in the machine. So if you were to take the whole machine, you're taking the vault. Now before before any of you say, hey, I'm going to go on a life of crime and start knocking over a t

M machines a t M S. I knew. I told you at the beginning of the show that it was going to happen. I caught myself that I told you it was gonna happen. Um A lot of these have things inside the vault that if if stuff goes wrong, it will ruin the money inside there. Essentially a little

little explosive charges. Usually some of them have um explosive charges full of gas, so that if if a thief is trying to use a gas explosion to uh to open the vault, that it actually has gas that counteracts the explosive gas, rendering in inert so and that in that case, it's not necessarily destroying the money inside, it's just trying to destroy the the methodology that the thief is using to get the vault open. So yeah, there's

some other tech involved here that's kind of interesting. Um. Now I use a t M S. I mean I I try to be careful about and I try to keep a good eye on making sure that whatever device I'm using looks you know, totally legit and everything. Uh

it's it's ays. So I'm not saying that a t M s are so dangerous that no one should use them, but it does bear repeating that you should be vigilant and pay attention when you come up to an a t M Don't just you know, walk up and ignore all uh all safety especially you know, not just the machine itself, but you know, it's always good to take a quick look around you to make sure you're not gonna be mugged. I've never been mugged. I don't want it to happen. I'm gonna try and keep that street going.

But yeah, that's that's one of those things is that, you know, banks often would tell customers to you know, certain follow certain safety guidelines and be alert when you're using those machines, and you know, make sure you have your card ready before you go up to one and uh and and uh, you know, don't don't linger. Don't count your money as your until the dealing is done, I guess, But don't count your money right there at the machine. You know, don't give thieves the opportunity to

pounce on you. Uh in that in those cases now, of course, if you're in a nice, busy street and there's a lot of people around, you're probably in better shape than uh. You know, I'm talking about in the middle of the night, after you've gone clubbing all night long and you need that cash because you're about to go to that all night pancake house that only accepts cash. Just bear in mind your surroundings in the situation and

be careful. Yes, Also, it never hurts to try to cover your hand when you're typing in your pin because even if you don't see the little camera, it is possible that it may be one somewhere around. But it's just a good habit to get into. Oh, it makes it really hard to type in your pin correctly. I've found plus you just gotta use one like I do. Zero zero zero zero. It just goes right through one, two, three four using my luggage. UM. Yeah, the there there

is one exception. I mean, with all the the thousands of these machines that are there are everywhere in the world, um, and it is likely that the more remote machines are the ones that would be targeted by scammers. However, if you find yourself at the McMurdo station in Antarctica and use the a t M there, it's probably not been hacked, but it only dispenses frozen herring. And that wraps up

that classic episode of tech Stuff. I hope you guys weren't suffering from withdrawal get it because of a t M S. I'm sorry anyway, I hope you enjoyed it. We will be talking about all new technology in the next episodes, so make sure you stay tuned for that, and if you have suggestions for future episodes, we'll just get in touch with me let me know what you think. You can visit our website. It's at tech stuff podcast dot com and that has all the different ways to

get in touch with us. Don't forget to visit our merchandise store over at t public dot com slash tech stuff. Every purchase you make goes to help the show, and we've got lots of cool designs over there, So go check that out and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics, because it how stuff works dot com eight