TechStuff withdraws from the ATM

we're going funds out of the way. Early to they were gonna talk about automated teller machines or a t M machines. 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 nothing. 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? Oh right, no, the

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 ask 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 the 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. I 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 doesn't resemble the way at M S look and and act now. But it was an idea of a of an a 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 uh. 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 with drawing money in the first place. Yeah, so we're talking about people with ill gotten games, gamblers for example, places where gambling was not legal, and uh, 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 muse special vouchers or coins, yes, and the token. 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 days, 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 nineteen sixty eight in Britain there was a several banks used 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 it doing it on purpose.

Uh yeah. So some of the other players in this space, and that's mainly the real development of a t M S beyond the early nineteen thirty 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 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. 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 Wetzel. Now he was working in America and his machine started coming out around nineteen 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, then it's John Shepherd Baron. Yeah, and uh. Um the National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian recognized wetzel Um and his company Docutel, which was a baggage handling company UM, as the people who created the A t M. So it's yeah, I guess. And like I said, it all

depends on who you ask, sort of like television or radio. Yeah, they're like many other inventors. 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 Merrow 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 were 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 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. In 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 flocking 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, we know what side of the bread your butter? Never mind, all right, go ahead anyway. 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, there the machines used increased during the storm, and 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. 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 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. The material inside there, I mean, that'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 particle, 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 intrigue. 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, if the magnetic stripe gets damaged in some way. Um. You know some

people say that 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 remains closed. And the magnetic clasp depending on how your card is, how you're storing your card in the wallet, Uh, 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 also 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 could buy it. So, but yes, you've got your CPU in there. Uh. However, the a t M is not its own standalone UM machine. Like 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 uh 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 in your account you want to withdraw twenty dollars, it will say, okay, well Jonathan's got three, 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 strip 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 a 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, then what 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 wrote, I watched the documentary at Christmas, Caroll,

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 uh, 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. 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. Yes. And then there's also the thickness sensor, so that if uh, 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, then it's

gonna 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, what. Meanwhile, 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 ben 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, and 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 it might mean that the actual bills that are being put into the machine are of to 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 been. 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, Yes, 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 tuppens anyway, 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 a 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 to watch that people are who they say they are. Yeah, so you can match up 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 penn stolen so that someone else has accessed your account through an a t M, 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 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 me 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 the UM. 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 UH encrypted, you know, and it's encrypted on the card, so it can't UH 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

him in our smartphone owns 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 smaller, 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 skimmed 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 dollars 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

scanning 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 with 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 latex 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 keypad, which which is essentially a key logger that's logging up pen entries.

So if you ever walk up to an A t M and 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 the time to install those devices without getting caught doing 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, would be less likely to be hit. That's not saying that some enterprising thief hasn't tried it, 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, basically because it's easier to crow bar your way into one than bother trying to Because we didn't mention the code 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 gonna 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 a 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 us. 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 going to 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 catch your

money right there at the machine. You know, don't give thieves the opportunity to pounce on you 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. 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. 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 I can't guarantee that it only dispenses frozen herring. No, there actually is an A t M at McMurdo station

in an Antarctica. I don't know why, but I saw it mentioned in several of the articles I was using for research. I guess just because it's so weird that there would be one there. You kind of wonder what you need cash for in Antarctica. So so you want to report fraud? Yes, so what what? What did he look like? Well, he was wearing a tuxedo. He's about two ft tall, about two ft tall, and imagine most of the people on most of the people on this block of eyes. All right, Well, on that note, we're

going to a not a bank note either. We're gonna wrap this up. So, guys, if you have any questions about types of technology you want to know more about, or maybe a company or a person in technology you want to know more about, send us an email our addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook are handled, There is tech stuff hs W and Chris and I will talk to you again a really soon. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.

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