Some tourist places--the little shops that you might see on a San Francisco pier, for example--have run scams in which their POS equipment captures your PIN when you enter it. They imprint your card number on a plastic blank, then use the PIN to clean out as much of your bank account as they can. Because a lot of their customers are on vacation, the victims may not find out for days or weeks.

I don't know if someone has figured out a way to prevent this, but I would only use my ATM/debit card at a bank, or big store. The suggestion of a travel-only card also makes sense to me.

JoAnne in northern California