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Are ATMs Violence Magnets? It's Hard To Say

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By RON WORD, The Associated Press

Published: November 19, 2007

JACKSONVILLE - An off-duty Orlando police officer is gunned down after withdrawing money from an automated teller machine. Two armored truck guards are shot to death in northeast Philadelphia while servicing a bank ATM. A retired couple is accosted in their Jacksonville home and then forced to reveal their ATM numbers before being buried alive.

These examples point out that the neighborhood ATM, a fixture of modern society, can be a place of violence and death. How big a problem are robbery and murder and their connection to automated teller machines? It seems either no one knows or no one is telling.

The banking and ATM industries acknowledge that crimes occur, but they insist that the numbers are so small, they are insignificant. They also say that no one keeps a tally of the number of violent attacks at these cash machines: not the FBI, not the police and not the banking industry.

"This an ATM is a very fertile place for somebody to be robbed," said Rob T. Guerette, a professor at Florida International University, who has researched ATM crimes and co-authored a study with Rutgers University Professor Ronald V. Clarke.

Guerette describes the easy pickings at an ATM as somewhat akin to lions waiting at an African watering hole for the gazelles and zebras to come by.

But Doug Johnson, a spokesman for the banking group, said no new figures exist on violence at ATMs. The last statistics were compiled 20 years ago, when the rate was about one crime for every 2 million transactions. There are more than 10 billion transactions a year at U.S. ATMs.

"While the prevalence of crime has remained low in relation to the number of transactions, the sheer number of transactions, and the opportunities for robbery and other crimes that they present, has meant that ATM crime is no longer rare," the 2003 study by Guerette and Clarke reported.

Michael S. Scott, who wrote "Robbery at Automated Teller Machines," a guide for the Justice Department's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, thinks ATM-related crime has gone down since he published his first research in 2001.

Scott, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, is the former chief of police in Lauderhill.

"The best one can conclude is that the overall rate of ATM-related crime is somewhere between one per million or one per 3.5 million transactions, suggesting that such crime is relatively rare," Scott said.

Scott's study revealed that most ATM robberies are committed by a lone offender against a lone victim and most occur between the hours of midnight and 4 a.m.

But Mike Lee, international director of the ATM Industry Association, said the hour between 6 and 7 p.m. is the peak hour for transactions and ATM crime.

As a result of ATM robberies, some locales, including Florida, California, Nevada, Washington, Oregon, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, Illinois and New Jersey, have imposed rules governing the placement and security of ATMs.

Scott said placement, lighting, landscaping and security at ATMs, some of it mandated by state laws and local regulations, have increased since the machines were first introduced in the mid-1960s.

"As long as there has been money, there is a risk of armed robbery," Scott said. "Have they become safer? Most of the evidence would suggest they have."

ATM SAFETY

The following are the basic safety procedures cardholders should follow when using an ATM:

•Never use an ATM that looks suspicious or if there are suspicious-looking individuals nearby.

•Never accept help from a stranger at an ATM.

•Never disclose your PIN to anyone or allow anyone behind you to watch you entering it.

•Never allow yourself to be distracted while carrying out your transaction.

•Never use ATMs that have messages or signs affixed to them indicting that the screen directions have been changed, especially if the message is posted over the card reader.

Source: ATM Industry Association

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