Losing Money at the ATM.

ATMs are getting to be dangerous places.

We've always been warned about being careful for prying eyes that could obtain our PIN numbers and rip us off mercilessly.

People have hacked into ATMs and stolen money. Or just taken the whole damn machine. Boingboing.net recently reported a more low tech, but probably more effective way of scamming money from ATMs.

Thieves  have started putting glue on the "Enter," "Cancel" and "Clear" buttons, so a user would get stuck in mid-transaction.

At that point, the victim would go into the bank to ask a teller to help solve the predicament, and while the customer was doing that, the thief would go to the ATM, which was in mid-transaction, and the customer has already logged in his or her PIN number, remember, and take money.

The number of ways to lose money at ATMs is growing,

So on top of everything else, we now have to check the ATM before we start to see whether there's glue or other stuff to creat havoc. Life keeps getting more complicated.

Meanwhile, the Gothamist is heralding the days of $5 ATM fees. Seems banks are annoyed by new federal regulations limiting bank overdraft charges and debit card fees. They want to make up for the lost revenue somewhere, so the thought is, jack up the prices big time at ATMs.

We'll just have to plan carefully and not use any ATMs that don't belong to our own banks, won't we?