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About time! - this is the sort of service which is essential for all UK banks to implement with their ATM cards and Credit cards. Everybody needs this - the judge in Job v Halifax said in court that he had had his credit card cloned and used in Essex to buy pizzas "... and I haven't been to Essex for decades" (see my report on this case on my website.)

There have been unsubstantiated rumours for some years about a program called Bergamot which allows a criminal to get the PIN from an ATM card - in other words extract it from the cryptographic version stored on the card for use in off-line transactions. It is well known that the PIN is stored in encrypted form on modern ATM cards - check for yourself when you use your card in any terminal, the machine validates your PIN as being OK far too quickly for it to actually be performing this task online.

There is a rumour that from 2005 onwards UK banks accidentally created the current problem with Chip and PIN cards by selling their old non-Chip and PIN machines not as scrap but as viable units for use in the banking systems of developing countries such as Sri Lanka. What followed therefore was highly predictable - the cloning of ATM cards (without their Chip) and using them to withdraw money from UK accounts over the international banking system. This was the means whereby the Tamil Tigers funded much of their terrorist organisation.

For more on this topic see  ATMs - Now and Then