Oh noes! Look what I found!

'Scuse my newbness.

I suppose i'll be the foolish one to ask... any cash in it?

I don't think so, but I haven't opened it up yet. Considering the fact that the guy who gave it to me gave me all the other stuff (keys, and whatnot), I'll assume he emptied it out first.

... that my Dark Side conjures up seeing this. A more devious person would hack it up so that it acts like a normal ATM machine, but would do nothing but record the pin number the user punches in, then spit back some lame reason that the card can't be given back. Then later, said devious person would collect the cards and the pin numbers and have a heyday.

Or, when an ATM card is inserted the machine would record the pin number entered, make a digital copy of the card's magnetic strip, then spit the card back out saying there was an error in processing. The user would walk away thinking nothing of the exchange, but later find their bank account dry. All that the above mentioned devious person would need is access to a device that can program the magnetic strips.

A scam like that probably wouldn't last long, but I could see it happening. I'm surprised that a machine like that can be obtained so easily, especially with the possibilities for wrongdoing that come with having control over it. Downright scary.

It's already been done. There are also cases where some people have attached magstripe readers to Palm handhelds and used them for "skimming." I can remember one particular example of a waiter who would "skim" customers' cards while ringing them up for their dinner. That's why I only use ATMs from my own bank, not those "generic" ones (and also because from any other ATM I, like many others, get charged up the wazoo with "service fees").

I'd be more interested in hooking the thing up to a computer and figuring out how the gosh darn thing works.

Knowledge is power! Or so they say...

I don't know about those independent ATM's, but the ones up here for the Royal Bank run OS/2 Warp. Does it flash anything on the screen when the power is turned on? If nothing else, maybe it has some goodies you could use in your other computers (wishful thinking, I'm sure :-P).

Definitely keep us up-to-date with your findings!

Cheers,

The Czar.

From when Jon and I got 'er opened up yesterday:

I'll br writing some stuff on it later on. I had to go buy a 600 pound capacity stair-climber pneumatic-tire hand-cart just to move this to my storage facility. Ugh this thing is heavy.

More pics later. Thanks again, Jon, for helping me move this behemoth out and back into my car.

It was fun in that geeky-getting-to-play-with-a-working-ATM way, but not in the sweating-in-the-mid-90s-degree-heat kinda way. We've come across bits and bobs of other ATMs that had fallen off of trucks and right into one of our geekly mitts (BTW that ATM controller computer we landed was just a P-100, haven't powered it up yet) but this was our first hands-on with a complete and working ATM. It's not as fully featured as a regular bank ATM, so it didn't have an internal HDD or system computer like the big-uns so I'm surmising that alot of that functionality is handled by the dial-in ATM service company that verifies cards and balances and such.

I'm suprised and the quality of pics that camera took. It was good bright sunlight, so it had a good environment to work with, I guesss.

They were so clear because I was in high rez mode and I cleaned them up in GIMP and cropped/shrunk them down.

Sooo I had to buy a $50 handcart to move this thing to storage where I could play with it some more.

I got it moved to storage sunday. today I went back to tinker and take more pics. Again my digicam sucks and has no screen so I didn't get the whole thing in these shots. Hard to line it up when the viewfinder lies and there's no preview mode.

Here is is:

Front panel unlocked and opened, vault exposed:

Boltwork, LG 3332-3 combination lock case with silent alarm and open alarm wires, combination change key inserted:

From the top: Cash conveyor, Reject bin, cash box, main power supply. To the right, power distribution unit

Close up of conveyor, reject bin and cash box, both of which have green tamper indicators

OOPS! I tried to get into the cash box, red tamper indicator present.

Reset tamper indicator by opening and closing with the high security key

Close up of the latch that gets you into the printer, modem, and keypad area on top of the vault

Close up of the release button and handle to pull the guts out on the rail system:

Inside the upper compartment: Top to bottom, power wire and 3 serial cables going to the keypad/LCD, 33.6k modem, reciept paper reel, thermal printer

Close up of the back of the keypad/LCD, also shown to the right is the prop that holds the upper compartment open

Cash box loaded with every freaking dollar I own.

Inside the reject and cash box slots, buttons that are pressed by nubs on the backs of the cartridges (idenfities what kind of cartridge is installed, I am assuming):

Here it is

Sweet. Did you play with it and feed some cash through? FWIW you might have built and linked to an article (Create Content - Story, etc.) so you wouldn't have to deal with the forum munging stuff as much.

I forgot this is a full-on CMS not just a forum.

Anyhow, I can't power it up easily in my storage room because there's no outlets. I might get one of those light bulb outlet things to put in there. I didn't run cash through it, I just stuffed about $30 in cash into the cash box for display purposes.

I took the ATM somewhat apart, not much further than you see in my photos, and did a little write up describing the internals and how it ticks (and some black and white pictures). It was published in the most recent 2600 magazine. Interested parties should give it a read. I'll have a digital copy of the article on my website later this week if you don't feel like forking over the $5.50 for the rag (or can't find it)