From today’s Boston Herald:
ATMSafetyPin is a certain Joe Zingher, as the hardreading staff noted previously, “a Chicago lawyer who holds U.S. Patent 5,731,575, ‘Computerized system for discreet identification of duress transaction and/or duress access’ at ATM banking machines.”
Here’s the ad he ran in the Globe in April.
And here’s his argument from the Herald ad (the Globe reference in the headline is largely playing to the cheap seats):
Mr. Zingher claims his interest is not financial, since his patent is close to expiring. “The idea I’m going to make any money off this is ridiculous,” he told us in April. He also said he hopes to “trigger a class action suit” because suppressing ATM crime information has been part of the banking industry’s business model for 30 years.
Sounds like a pretty good business model for Mr. Zingher too, yeah?
[…] Specifically, Zingher would like to see banks introduce ATM duress codes. Not coincidentally, Zinger holds a patent for one such code – a reverse PIN (U.S. Patent 5,731,575). For the record, he addressed that issue in an earlier post: […]