8-Year-Old Girl Gets Lost on Her Way Home After Dance Class and Uses an ATM to Get Help

After getting lost, an anxious girl used an ATM to reunite with her family.

The 8-year-old child in Quzhou, China, got separated from her grandfather on July 30 after leaving a dance class, according to the South China Morning Post. Unable to find him, the girl found an ATM kiosk, where she pressed an emergency button and was connected to the bank’s call center.

The girl told a Quzhou Rural Commercial Bank employee on the call that she was lost and did not know the phone numbers of her family members. The employee contacted the police and stayed on the line to comfort her. 

Officers from the Kaihua County Public Security Bureau arrived to the scene to help reunite the girl with her family. The Global Times reported that the police escorted her back home because she knew her address.

A report obtained by the outlet stated that the girl's mother had taught her about the ATM call buttons and advised her to find one if she was ever in a situation where she needed help.

Multiple Chinese outlets have said that many local ATM booths in the city have two types of emergency buttons near the machine, one of which is an emergency call button and the other is an emergency alarm button.

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In the United States, some ATMs have emergency buttons but they are not standardized. A long-running myth is that ATMs will alert authorities if the user inputs their pin number backward, but the Associated Press reported in 2022 that "no known ATM in the United States has this feature."