Design Against ATM Crime

Using ATMs is a daily occurrence for most people. In the UK £185.7 billion was withdrawn from ATMs in 2010, that’s £6000 per second. Although most transactions are crime free, a signifcant proportion are not. In 2010 ATM crime cost the UK a total of £33.2 million, accounting for just over 8% of total card fraud1. The same patterns are repeated across the world, the numbers proportionately signifcant. Some 6.4% of plastic card users reported being victim of one or other kind of fraud during 2009-102. Despite sophisticated technological, procedural and defensive strategies developed to combat ATM crime, it has been impossible in many areas to thwart the best endeavours of thieves, robbers and fraudsters. Many criminal techniques simply exploit user behaviour in order to successfully steal money. To address this issue the Design Against Crime Research Centre initiated the ATM Art project in partnership with the Metropolitan Police Hammersmith. DACRC also initiated the ‘Design Against ATM Crime’ project and set a brief supported by NCR to challenge design students at three signifcant design schools in different parts of the world. They were:
Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, UAL
Delft University of Technology
University of Technology Sydney

The challenge was, “Can staff and students at these design institutions fnd new approaches to generating behaviour change as well as cost-effective solutions to help tackle ATM crime?” You can make up your own mind as to how successful they were as you review the contents of this catalogue. The design responses included here adopt what NCR talk about as the “multi-layered approach” to secure design and aim not just to design against crime but to catalyse behaviour change, and to fnd new ways to involve the public in helping to protect themselves.

This Catalogue about ATM Crime offers various solutions from students around the world.