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Murder renews calls for ATM safety measures

But beyond cameras and withdrawal limits, banks have little to offer customers

Amy Lord, 24, was abducted and killed.

The plastic debit card inside your wallet can tell a bank plenty about you, from which coffee shop you frequent to whether you’re getting gas 1,000 miles away from home.

But could it have prevented a crime such as the brutal murder of 24-year-old Amy Lord?

Lord’s death has unnerved South Boston residents, renewed calls for banks to add safety features to automatic teller machines, including panic buttons, and raised questions about how financial institutions track suspicious behaviors through debit transactions. Lord was kidnapped and forced to stop at five ATMs before she was stabbed to death.

Aside from cameras, a bank’s primary deterrent against debit card and ATM crime remains limits on how much cash a customer can withdraw in a single day. When the customer reaches the cap over the course of a day, a bank prevents any further cash withdrawals.

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The daily withdrawal limits vary by type of accounts but most are in the $500 range. At TD Bank, customers can take out up to $750 from an ATM using a debit card. At Sovereign Bank, the limit is $1,000, and at Eastern Bank the default cap is $500.

It’s unclear whether Lord made withdrawals at all five machines, but it would have been unlikely for Lord to get money from all those banks if she was using only one debit card, said Shirley Inscoe, a senior analyst with Boston-based Aite Group, who specializes in bank security issues. Once Lord reached the daily withdrawal limit on her card, she couldn’t have taken any more money out, no matter which bank ATM she visited, Inscoe said.

Debit card fraud is not as obvious to detect as, say, large credit card purchases at appliance stores far from a customer’s home, analysts said. Reaching the withdrawal limit wouldn’t necessarily set off alarms for banks, since countless customers hit the limit for a variety of reasons, such as paying cash for an expensive shopping spree.

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“All the best technology from the world and all the banks in the world wouldn’t have helped,” said Joram Borenstein, a vice president at NICE Actimize, which provides banks and other financial institutions software to prevent fraud, money laundering, and other crimes.

Banks may amass large quantities of information about customer behavior, but they don’t always have the manpower to monitor it, Borenstein said. When it comes to ATMs and debit cards, banks are more likely to devote money and manpower to detecting large scale fraud.

In May, for example, federal prosecutors revealed that a network of thieves had hacked into ATMs around the world and in a matter of hours had drained more than $40 million from banks. “Most of the fraud and financial crime that financial institutions try to prevent has nothing to do with physical crime,” Borenstein said.

Banks also face a balancing act when it comes to security. While they want to make sure that debit cards and ATMs are safe, analysts said, they can’t make them so difficult to access, or set withdrawal limits so low, that they lose one of their major strengths: convenience. Precautions such as limiting the number of times a day a customer can use a debit card or adding another layer of identification before a customer can get money would make banking more of a hassle.

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“Ultimately, banks want to make transacting with them easy,” Borenstein said. “They don’t want consumers to go through too many hoops.”

Banks declined to comment on security procedures, but said that the safety of customers is a top priority.

“We have fraud detection systems and processes in place but don’t publicly disclose these security measures,” said Jim Hughes a spokesman for Citizens Bank, one of the country’s largest regional banks.

Joe Bartolotta, a spokesman for Eastern Bank, said his bank, the largest community bank in the Boston area, had no plans to change procedures.

“We have found the mechanisms we have in place have been successful in identifying fraud,” Bartolotta said.

Banks also have been reluctant to add panic buttons and telephones to ATM machines, although some Massachusetts legislators have called on the state to mandate these measures after Lord’s murder. Previous ATM safety bills have failed to become law.

Bank representatives have said panic buttons and telephones would increase false alarm calls, add costs, and place most of the burden on banks, instead of automated cash machines at grocery stores, gas stations, and other businesses.

“These situations are so rare and so heartbreaking,” said Inscoe, the Aite Group analyst. “You wish you could take that leap and provide that security. But they are so rare that it would be hard to justify that investment.”


Deirdre Fernandes can be reached at deirdre.fernandes@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @fernandesglobe.