A slick rip-off begs the question: Can you trust that latent hunk of cash-dispensing steel?
Crime came this spring to that secure oasis of familiarity, the anywhere and everywhere of a sky-lit mall court, surrounded by such recognized enterprises as The Gap, Haagen-Dazs, Victoria's Secret, The Sharper Image, Footlocker - and Babbage's Software.
In that software store hung a portrait of its namesake, Charles Babbage, the stern, bewhiskered creator of the first computer. Babbage seemed to be looking across the mall, past the perfume cart and the pretzel stand to the automated teller machine that for sixteen days sat innocently on wheels as dozens of patrons tried in vain to obtain cash from it.
It could have been anywhere in the country - which is why the unprecedented deployment of a bogus ATM at a mall in Manchester, Connecticut, east of Hartford, sent a jolt through the hearts of bank-machine users everywhere. The fake ATM, brought in by brazen con artists who convinced mall officials they were genuine, recorded the card numbers and personal id numbers of some 200 patrons, including a clerk at Kay's Jewelry, across from the ATM.
It could have been any mall - or airport or large supermarket. But it was a mall named - aptly enough - Bucklands. The mall guards wear blazers with the Bucklands coat of arms on the breast.
There was no reason those guards should have been suspicious of the machine covered with stickers of some of the hundred or so national electronic banking networks, including the Yankee chain of New England; no reason to doubt the credentials of the official-looking man who kept showing up to work on it, occasionally chatting with passersby and clerks.
Since the first machine was installed at the Citizens & Southern Bank in sun-dappled Valdosta, Georgia in 1971, ATMs have quietly infiltrated our lives. They are the most public of computers. Even the elderly, long considered too technophobic to accept the robot tellers, have become the subject of intense marketing efforts by banks.
While home banking by computer has languished - ("The day I begin banking at home," a friend avers, "is the day when I can print out $20 bills on my LaserJet") - the ATM has become as universally accepted as the VCR.
ATMs, like any new technology, bring with them their own psychologies of time and space.
The amount of time ATMs save - the convenience we initially delighted in - has now been budgeted into our schedules. We count on them. The lines we once saw at the bank on Friday afternoon have been replaced by those at the mall ATM by the movie theater on Saturday night.
While in those lines, we instinctively keep a certain distance from the machine as we wait to use it - no one wants to give the impression of glancing over a shoulder to swipe a PIN.
It was in 1968, while waiting in line at a Texas bank, that Don Wetzel, an executive with Docutel (the firm that developed automated baggage handling equipment) let his mind wander. He struck upon the notion of replacing the human teller with an electronic one. Along with engineers Tom Barnes and George Chastain, he developed the now-familiar system of using a credit- type card with a magnetic strip and a personal id number to get cash.
There are now some 100,000 ATMs in the United States, handling about 650 million transactions each month. The new Orioles Park in Baltimore has two ATMs; four were reportedly destroyed in the recent Los Angeles riots.
The Bucklands Boys used the Fujitsu 7000, a model recently praised in the journal Bank Management for its "electronic journaling" capabilities. The Boys kept five more ATMs of various makes in storage, presumably waiting for things to cool down before invading another mall.
While us ATM sales peaked in 1989 at 10,000 units, the next few years are likely to see that figure rise as banks replace their first generation machines and the overseas market grows.
Tying into minis and mainframes in anonymous buildings, often halfway across the country, ATMs provide a new order of financial infrastructure. We have come not only to accept them, but depend on them. Only when the system fails do we notice it. In February, heavy snowfall collapsed the roof of an ATM processing facility in Clifton, New Jersey run by EDS Inc., (Ross Perot's old company). Six percent of the nation's ATMs were knocked out, some for several days. A million cardholders were at a loss.
But now that we've gotten used to them, we are at ease with ATMs. We resent their slowness, the rigidity of their programs, the junk-mail false- heartiness of their language - "Please take your card, Phil Patton" - but for the most part, we also consider them safe. Fraud is estimated to run up to US$3 million a year - a trivial figure given the total value of transactions in a year - averaging out to losses of about US$5,000 per participating bank.
Banks have always known the importance of conveying images of security (that's why they're built like temples and castles), and a perusal of banking journals reveals an appropriately cautious and conservative preoccupation with ATM security. Most banks still redress misuses of lost and stolen cards. Many urge patrons confronted with coercion to give up their Pins peacefully rather than risk harm, assured that the bank will cover them.
ATMs rarely "eat cards" as they did in the early days. And while they go "temporarily out of service" at the most inconvenient times - like five minutes before the movie starts when you have 75 cents in your pocket - they rarely stay down for long. So a machine that failed to deliver cash for more than a week was bound to elicit comment among the clerks at the stores around the mall court at Bucklands. Still, no one caught on. Then on Mother's Day two men arrived and wheeled the ATM away. The illicit cash withdrawals began soon after. The total mounted to US$50,000, then US$100,000 before they were caught.
"This crime is the first of its kind in the world," says Dan Marchitello, the Secret Service agent who broke the case. The nearest precedent was a Staten Island case in which the culprits set up a videocamera with a telephoto lens and recorded patrons keying in their Pins, then correlated them with the times on discarded receipts. (Don't leave that receipt lying around )
After a wave of crimes against those who had just visited ATMs, New York passed an ATM security law that requires the machine to be placed in an enclosed space with sufficient lighting, mirrors, and video-recording equipment to capture all transactions - a practice that is becoming almost universal.
That sort of record helped the Secret Service trip-up the Bucklands boys. Scanning video records at ATMs where accounts had been illicitly tapped, a video record at the storage rental facility where the bogus ATMs were stored, and then comparing those to composite sketches based on the observations of people working at the mall, they were prepared to track their men.
The search went on for weeks. The Boys slipped, ironically, by not paying their bills. When two men failed to settle a $20,000 bill they owed for equipment used to inscribe the magnetic strips on cards, the company contacted the Feds. The Boys also stiffed an ATM vendor in Atlanta, Marchitello reported.
On June 21, Secret Service agents arrested Alan Pace, 30, of New York City, and a few days later, Pace's alleged accomplice, Gerald Greenfield, 50, of Tucson. In addition, the five other ATMs, along with blank cards and forms, software for emulating a teller machine, two bullet-proof vests, and several handguns were seized.
The Bucklands incident may reawaken the nagging sense of distrust we once had when it came time to do business at an ATM. We still have a hard time trusting a "cash machine" to credit us with deposits. To overcome that sort of resistance, new machines offer color screens and improved graphic design. Bankers are looking to pattern recognition machines that will display an image of the deposited check on screen to reassure users and increase use of the machines for depositing and shifting funds.
Citibank recently began offering added services at ATMs - now you can pay your bills, even purchase a certificate of deposit. Rental car companies are using modified ATMs to speed transactions; airlines and Amtrak are using them to sell tickets. In one Georgia town, a bank recently teamed up with McDonald's, using ATMs to offer coupons called "McScrip" - a sort of currency negotiable only under the golden arches. ATMs are well on their way to becoming the soda machines of the future.
None of this is free. While ATMs should be saving banks money, fees for ATM use have gone up. These fees - almost invisible to the user because they are rolled into monthly bills - have become a subject of investigation by consumer agencies and Congress.
Smarter and smarter machines will be needed to thwart future Bucklands Boys. Experts naturally believe that the answer to ATM abuse lies in more and more sophisticated encryption devices. Some have offered fingerprint readers or retinal scanners as suggested identification technology. But the PIN system has an advantage of keeping the "key" to an account in two parts - half in hardware, half in wetware. Any system that relies on a single device, however cleverly encrypted, is a less secure system.
To study the expression on the face of Charles Babbage as he gazes toward the blank surface of the pillar where the rogue Fujitsu once sat at Bucklands, one imagines he knows he hasn't seen the end of ATM abuse.
