4 ms·
My PIN number is 8+ numbers long, and to my chagrin, I discovered in 2006 that most ATMs in Europe didn't accept anything more than 6, and most accepted only 4.
by steve8918 14y ago
My PIN number is 8+ numbers long, and to my chagrin, I discovered in 2006 that most ATMs in Europe didn't accept anything more than 6, and most accepted only 4. I'm not sure if things have changed since then, but in the 5 countries I was in, the only ATM that accepted 8 was in Amsterdam, near the end of my trip.
- nucleardog 14y agoI've been using 10 in Canada for several years now. I initially carried cash on me as I expected it not to work at a lot of places... So far I've only had one issue which was at a parkade. The payment machine only accepted six digits on debit cards.
- ecmendenhall 14y agoThis happened to me, too. For once, carrying travelers checks came in handy. In Turkey, most ATMs accept my extra-long PIN, but very few have UIs designed to fit more than 4 digits. On many of them, the digits will continue outside of the form field and sometimes all the way off the screen.
- rrreese 14y agoDid machines just reject your pin, or did they accept the first 4-6 digits?
- danielweber 14y agoThis happened to me in the United States. I had a 8 digit PIN, but only the first 4 mattered to the ATM. The screen would blink after the first 4 numbers, too, to help you notice you already had it. Then two weird things: 1. The bank got bought by someone else, and the new bank demanded 6 digits. I had stopped using anything past the first 4, but they were still the first six from the original form I filled out years earlier. 2. They sent me my full PIN in the mail. At first I was surprised by this, since one-way-hash and all that jazz, but on reflection one-way hashing a six-digit PIN is pretty silly.
- jrgnsd 14y agoI don't get why banks restrict the number of digits of a pin. The bank I'm with limits your pin to 4 digits. Is it a usability issue, or don't they realise that more digits means more pin options?
- oftenwrong 14y agoI ran into the same issue while traveling in South America. Some ATMs would not work at all with my 8+ PIN. Strangely, there was one ATM that accepted 4 digits and then automatically continued to verification of the PIN. I never got a chance to enter the rest of the digits, but it still passed verification and allowed me to withdraw.
- taejo 14y agoOn the other hand, my bank only allows 4, and when I go overseas, I sometimes can't use my card at all because they require at least 5/6/8.
- Permit 14y agoI wonder if you could prepend your PIN with 0's. If the input is interpreted as a number, it might work. If they cast it to a string, it probably wouldn't.