3 ATM Questions

Factual Questions
21

FWIW that ATM’s in Mexico dole out all sorts of different bills. AND they don’t charge for foreign (in the sense of not being a customer AND being from the US) ATM cards (but there’s still my own bank’s fee for not using my bank’s ATM).

The smallest you can take out is MX$20, which happens to be the smallest Mexican paper currency. The largest I’ve personally seen is MX$500, but depends on the ATM. Generally the amounts I took out resulted in mostly of MX$200 bills, but many of the machines mix, meaning I often get a wad of MX$200s, with some MX$100’s, MX$50’s, and sometimes $MX20’s mixed in. MX$20 is worth about US$2.20 by the way.

22

I’ve never had problems withdrawing, but I have had problems with deposits.

I once deposited my paycheck into the ATM, and the envelope was physically jammed in the machine. Three weeks and one replaced paycheck later, the first deposit finally shows up. Darn company put a stop-payment on the first check, so that was deducted from my balance.

I don’t make deposits in ATMs anymore.

Robin

23

I have indeed witnessed an ATM malfunctioning.
I went to college at ASU in Tempe and there is an ATM on Stadium Drive that one evening, to the delight of many people, dispensed an extra $20 with every transaction.
There was already a few people crowded around the machine as my friend and I approached it, & a girl before us pointed out that she had received $40 instead of the $20 she had asked for, and somebody else had the same thing happen to them. My friend then withdrew $200 from his account, thinking that he would get $400 - we were thinking that it was doubling withdrawls at that point. He got $220.
I then emptied my account (which had $300 or so in it) by $20 withdrawls, getting $40 each time. We then hit happy hour (at Macayo’s for anyone familiar with the area) and celebrated our luck.
I was never contacted about the extra money, and it was not taken from my account.
We passed the same ATM on the way home and it was shut down.
As I write this it seems ridiculous, but it really did happen. I have witnesses!

24

Here’s one for you.

Back in the early days of ATMs there was one here in NYC (in a bank on 14th Street, IIRC) that dispensed twenties, tens, fives, ones and – get this – COINS! You could specify the exact amount you wished to withdraw, down to the penny, and it would comply.

It was the only one I ever saw that could do that.

25

I’ve been shorted somewhere around 5 or 6 times, sadly, I’ve never been gifted. Occasionally you’ll hear news stories of a machine giving out fifties instead of twenties, and customers going nuts. The fools. The bank has photos of them and also can easily trace said moron making his normal one transaction, followed by a dozen more (this is not a normal banking pattern). Those cases are easily adjusted, and a simple threat of prosecution usually makes fools honest.

I once read a hilarious saga of a kid that made a deposit of one of those ‘promotional’ checks, be I’ll be damned if I can find it.

26

you talkin’ about this ?

http://www.goodthink.com/$$tablecontents.html

27

I work for a company that manufactures ATMs.

  1. Yes, it is the case that some people have in fact not received the amount that they were supposed to receive.
    It is also true that this is exceedingly rare. I knew one banking system that moved around $800,000/day, yet on average had less than $500 worth of “I didn’t get my money” complaints per day.
    On this network, that works out to about one transaction in 1800 screwing up in that fashion. Incidentally, this customer was unhappy with having that level of complaints, and wanted less.
    If you do not in fact receive the correct amount of money from an ATM, immediately check your bank to make sure that your account was not debited.
    If your account was debited, contact the operator of the ATM in question and ask them for satisfaction. Many will ask you to send them a signed letter stating the situation, and process a refund as soon as they can investigate.
    If the ATM operator refuses to investigate based on your phone call (which at least one company I know of has a policy of doing) you will need to contact your bank.
    Go into the branch. Speak to the customer service desk, and if they have any difficulty at all helping you politely ask if you can speak to the manager.
    They should have a form, referred to at some banks as a “Regulation E” form for the FTC regulation it complies with.
    The bank has 10 days by FTC regulation to respond to your dispute. If there are special circumstances, it may take them longer to investigate. Laws relating to this may be found at the FTC’s web site at:
    http://www.federalreserve.gov/Regulations/RegRef.htm#e

As to how the guys who run the ATM would know if you got your money or not, there are two ways they could tell.
The first would be to look at the logs of the ATM’s operation that are stored on both the ATM and the ATM’s host controller. In some cases a botched dispense will result in an error about the dispense being logged there. Sometimes we get an error in there, but the money DOES get dispensed any darn way, which is why your account may get debited when the money does not get dispensed, even though we know it might not have gotten dispensed.
This brings us to the second way… when money attempts to dispense but does not dispense, there is a container called the
“divert cassette” that it winds up in.
When the armed guards or other cash handlers reload the machine, they pull the divert casette’s contents for counting at HQ. When HQ discovers “Hey, this ATM is $200 over, and we have a complaint from dolphinboy that he got stiffed $200!,” they will proceed to let the banker know that the customer got stiffed, and transfer appropriate funds via direct deposit into the appropriate account.
The only way you can really get screwed is if the guy in the Brinks truck has sticky fingers, or if someone else also claimed they got stiffed $200.

  1. They’re so reliable because we cheat. Most conventional ATMs have very well-designed dispensers. Hell, we’ve had 20 years or so to get them right. But also, there is a category of money referred to as “fit bills”. It costs a little bit more to buy a stack of fit bills, but they’re essentially guaranteed to be in mind condition, and not be creased, badly deformed, etc.
    Most, but not all ATMs use “fit bills”. The ATMs that don’t use fit bills a kind of mesh webbing that traps all bills in a kind of conveyor belt for dispense.

  2. ATMs mostly dispense $20s to save on the hassle of having cash handlers performing more manual labor.
    Most ATMs only have one of their cartridges stocked, even though many models have room for as many as 4 different cartridges.
    (Having one cartridge in the ATM filled regularly by cash handlers costs one of my customer between $100 and $200. Emergency fills can run $300-400). Perhaps having multiple cartridges stocked would drive up cash handling expenses. Also, some models of ATM only come with one cartridge, and it would cost extra money to have additional cartridges installed.

On a side note, there are ALL KINDS of other things you can do with ATMs. One bank I know of purchases and deploys an ATM with an attached sidecar which will take your properly formatted paycheck, and cash it down the cent, minus their cashing fee.

Other common items to dispense besides cash include stamps and calling cards.

I really wish banks would deploy more fancy ATMs, but most continue to do nothing but dispense $20 bills.

28

I work for a company that sells ATMs.

To my knowledge, there are ATMs that run on OS/2 (tons of them, actually), ATMs that run on Windows 2000 (common now) and some of the smaller vendors make ATMs that run on small embedded operating systems.

29

I’ve seen a lot of ATMs near campus that distribute $5 in addition to $20.

I guess they figure us college kids sometimes don’t have $20 in the back.

30

I worked in a gas station for a while where we had one of those ATMs with really awful fees. Anyway, the boss kept it filled with our drops from past days, however, he generally didn’t put in all that much. Plus, the thing has a tendency to jam in the feed, and it seemed at least once a week somebody would run it out of money before getting all their withdrawl. We just told them to keep an eye on their checking account and call their bank if something looked wrong.

31

I was in line at a Bank of America ATM once and the guy in front of me got a $100 bill instead of a $20. He was slightly conflicted about whether he should report it, and finally decided to report it. I just got regular $20 bills, so I guess it was 1 $100 in the middle of a stack of $20’s, which seems strange to me.

32

I give up.

Please, don’t say “ATM machine”. It brings out the Felix Unger in me.

Thank you.

33

Some of the ATMs in Sydney will ask you which notes you would like. For example, when withdrawing $120, you will be prompted:
How would you like to receive your cash?
Select one:
6x$20
2x$50 and 1x$20

At some, you can also get postage stamps, phone cards, and you can pay bills.

Most of them aren’t so fancy though.

34

I opened a new checking account recently, and the teller spent about 20 minutes telling me about a problem they’d recently resolved with the atm. She said that for several weeks people had been claiming to have deposited money or checks, but the envelopes weren’t showing up. The bank thought that the customers were lying, but it happened often enough (though not with every deposit), that they finally had someone try to fix it. As soon as the mechanic moved the machine, a cascade of deposit envelopes fell out of the back. There was some problem with the machine, and the deposit envelopes, especially the heavy ones that had cash in them, were falling behind the machine.

35

Sorry to post so late, it looks like this thread was pretty much dead, but I felt I had a couple (somewhat) informative points to add. I work for an EFT network, so, we handle the back end for these things. First, as to the reliability: Jonathan Woodall touched on it a bit, but there’s a little bit more. There are sensors on rollers that can detect the thickness and width of the bills being passed through; it knows those specs for a single bill. While it helps having the “fit” bills he speaks of, it’s not totally necessary. It’s important to have the same types of bills, all new or all old. The sensors can recalibrate the specs, based on the cash being spit out. So, if in the same transaction, or consecutive transactions, you go from new bill (crisp, flat, uniform) to old (wrinkled, creased, torn), or vice versa, the machine will need to reset the specs, and dump the current pick to the divert. It will keep doing this until it gets consistent bills, and then finally dispense.
As to the experiment that x ash and r_k tried, taking some of the cash, and letting it retract the rest, how this affects your account is more on the network side. When an ATM presents cash,and it is retracted, the terminal sends us a message marking that transaction as suspect. Meaning, in this instance, “I put the cash out, but don’t know how much or how little was removed”. It used to be that the transaction would NOT debit the cardholders account, but as many more fraudulent transactions were made in this manner, it was switched to debit the account, and sort out the problem later. This way, you can’t withdrawal more than was actually in your account, where as before, it was unlimited. Suspect transactions occur for bill jams and miscounts, for dispensed cash and “diverted” cash as well. Any time the machine isn’t sure what or if it dispensed.
King Friday, it is likely the machine didn’t dispense the cash, but it went to divert. Also, it would not have negatively affected the balance of your account, because the transaction would have been reversed. The network, or terminal driver, waits for a completion message from the ATM, and if it doesn’t get that, it reverses the transaction, or at least marks it as suspect. Also, there are timers at the ATM and network levels, where if certain messages are not recieved within a certain amount of time they “time out” and the transaction is again flagged, and comm faults noted. The transactions do not hang out there indefinitely, like in the case of a power outage.

36

I was very surprised the first time I used an ATM in Mexico. For the withdrawal it issued at least two denominations of bills, possibly more, rather than the $20.00 equivalent. That seems unnecessarily complex, but it did work.

Bob

37

a friend that worked on atm’s told me about a screw up that was giving people an extra $20. was to be a $20 coupon for openning a new account at the bank.
she said that they (chevy chase bank) debited the extra $20 from the accounts as if the user requested the actual amount recieved

the one time in zillions i was shorted $20 the bank took care of it with one phone call - no trouble. never got any extra.

38

I that simular to PIN number?

39

One ATM right at my undergrad university dispenses only $5 bills. Which was just as well, since so many poor college kids only need $10 or so at a time. Must be a pain in the butt, though, if you wanted to take out more than 40 bucks.

40

Since the money that is put in bank ATMs is usually from wrapped stacks of bills, getting a $100 when requesting a $20 is more likely to have been a bank error in the money-handling department than by the individual who has filled the machine.