A while back a woman in Boston was abducted at random, forced at knifepoint to withdraw money at an ATM, and then brutally murdered before anyone even knew she

A while back a woman in Boston was abducted at random, forced at knifepoint to withdraw money at an ATM, and then brutally murdered before anyone even knew she was missing. In response the state proposed requiring ATM security features like a panic button, active monitoring of the surveillance cameras, or some sort of alarm system. Of course the banks pushed back because of the long-term implementation costs and also because of the supposedly risk false alarms. But one of the ideas that I thought sounded like a good compromise was a duress PIN. The idea being that a customer could opt to set a PIN that would work exactly like their normal/“real“ PIN (dispense funds, etc.) except it would silently alert police. It didn’t happen, in the end. Partially because the banks were strongly opposed to the “overreach” and partially because the public outrage about the abduction died down before anything meaningful could happen in response. It was a neat idea, though.