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by ntauthority 1479 days ago
A year ago, I had to go to a bank office and engage in some verification process that also required me to use the physical bank card with its preassigned PIN.

No matter what I tried, I hit the 3-try limit for the day, and opted to have the same preassigned PIN sent by mail to my home address.

When walking back home from the bank branch I realized the mistake I had made: I had entered the correct PIN, but had typed it in calculator/numeric keypad order, and not in phone/PIN pad order.

While I've never used that PIN on a numeric keypad for a PC, somehow my brain associated the numbers with their order on a PC keypad, since I had used my PC keypad to unlock my PC with a PIN numerous times more than I had used any card terminal with a PIN.

So, the next day, I returned to the bank branch office to try the same operation again, and indeed - I had correctly entered the PIN and the online banking transfer limit ended up adjusted just fine.

1 comments

For the past decade and a half, possibly longer, Japanese ATMs have replaced their physical keypads with digital ones where the numbers are randomly placed. Imagine my surprised when the first times I tried to enter my PIN, it kept failing until I took a good close look at the numbers.