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Here in New Zealand banks reject sequential and repeating numbers for your PIN, and they also check for your birthdate.

So the trick is to find their anniversary or first child's birthday.

That's awfully nice of them to significantly reduce the search space.

That's one thing the article should have taught you: a large search space is worthless when, given the chance, customers restrict themselves to tiny parts of it.

It is rather. Though given that the majority of transactions are electronic here people share PINs all the time, that irks me.

You're sharing pins for electronic transactions? What the what? (I'm over the pond in Australia, and I've never shared any of my various pins with anyone.)

I wouldn't! A lot of people do though, it's the downside of a mostly cashless economy, but with the rise of internet banking and near-instant transfers online it should go away.

But why would you? What is the pin for??

As someone who knows someone else's PIN: if they're too inconvenienced by making the payment themselves and don't realize what security it's meant to offer, they'll be quite content to hand the card and the PIN to someone they trust.

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