At what moment do ATM machines stop delivering money?

Factual Questions
21

I have had machines give me money even when refusing other customers money, and vice-versa. And this when I am absolutely certain that I have money in my account (when I was refused but they weren’t) and when the conversations I heard made me almost as certain that people who were refused did have funds available.

That makes it seem likely that cashpoints in the UK will refuse to give you money if you’re asking for more than they have in stock. So if I’m asking for 100 quid and the machine only has 90 in, it can still service the next three people asking for forty, thirty and twenty quid each - or it might bork the next person after me who’s also asking for more than 90 quid.

I’ve never been given less money than I asked for, like with the other posters here, and would probably be panic-stricken if that happened, because I’d never heard of it and wouldn’t be so sure that the money was recredited to my account. It does take a few days for money to be credited to your account in the UK, and I think it’s faster in the US; here it would be a very unfair way of rendering your own funds inaccessible to you.

22

Short answer: There are as many different systems as there are types of ATMs, and the way they are programmed depends on the manufacturer.

23

The ATMs are cheap, but the ink is so expensive… that it sometimes takes a while to refill it-- sometimes til the next budget.

The ATM on our corner switches from $20 bills to $2 bills when it gets low… and you’ll see a lot of people waving “them deuces” around, yelling “Deuces Day!” (it’s quite festive) and telling clerks “It’s all about the Jeffersons, bay-bay…”

24

To amend what I said earlier, I do remember hearing the branch manager and head teller complaining about having to do an emergency refill once because both ATMs emptied on a long weekend (which meant getting a vault bypass and on-site security in addition to the two of them). Technically, I was correct. I never saw both empty.

25

This situation (out of cash) is rare because the ATM’s phone home when they are getting low, and notify the home bank that they will need a refill sooner than the normally scheduled one. And it happens mostly on weekends, when it is harder to get people out to refill the machines.

26

Not sure this is true. I’ve had the experience in the UK of a machine refusing to dispense my money (with much whirring and clanking) and then going out of service. By the time I’d walked the fifty yards to the next machine, and obtained a mini-statement, the bank had processed a debit and a corresponding credit.

27

This has happened to me once.

Although that machine may have had enough cash left to handle a smaller request, it would seem like a good policy to then go “Out of Service” just to avoid customer confusion.

28

I did not know this. Seems like an eminently sensible move.

29

Okay.
I can answer this one.
I spent several months being the guy that receiving phone calls from people that didn’t get their money from the ATM.
As an aside, this was an unpleasant job. Surprisingly, I was not sworn at once.

Q: Can ATMs dispense the last bill in the machine?
A: Some can, some can’t. We had some machines that would screw up before the final bill got dispensed.
Many brands of ATM use dispensing hardware that they purchase from these guys:

I can’t say that all vendors use that gear, however.

STATEMENT: This situation (out of cash) is rare because the ATM’s phone home when they are getting low, and notify the home bank that they will need a refill sooner than the normally scheduled one. And it happens mostly on weekends, when it is harder to get people out to refill the machines.
REMARK: Some ATMs don’t phone home until they are out of currency. Some banks, especially ones operating ATMs not attached to physical bank branches, have to pay an armored car service to deliver and install the money. A regularly scheduled visit to the ATM can be affordable, but an ‘emergency’ refill can be several times as expensive as a normal refill. One ATM operator I am aware of decided to not pay the extra $300 to have an emergency refill a few days early.

STATEMENT: I’ve never been given less money than I asked for, like with the other posters here, and would probably be panic-stricken if that happened, because I’d never heard of it and wouldn’t be so sure that the money was recredited to my account. It does take a few days for money to be credited to your account in the UK, and I think it’s faster in the US; here it would be a very unfair way of rendering your own funds inaccessible to you.
REMARK: It does happen. Sometimes the picker is supposed to pull 9 bills, but only pulls 7. In the US, this typically means you got shorted $40. In some cases the machine realizes what happened. In other cases, it doesn’t.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU ASK FOR MONEY:
You insert your card, request a transaction, and enter your PIN.
After your request is made, the ATM contacts the network upstream of it, and gets authorization from your bank.
At the point the authorization is made, your account is charged for the transaction.
Once your account is charged, the network advises the ATM that it may initiate the dispense.
Your money is dispensed, and you can now go buy hot dogs. Or veggie dogs. Or whatever.

WHAT HAPPENS IF THINGS GO WRONG:
If the ATM dies between your transaction being authorized and your dispense being completed, you have been charged but do not get your money.
If the ATM attempts to dispense money but fails, and realizes the dispense failed, it will advise the network of the failure to dispense.
At that point, the network will issue a credit to your bank for the failure.
From this point, it can go a couple of ways.
Your bank, if it has modern systems and progressive policies, could immediately make the credited funds available to you.
If your bank has less modern systems and/or less customer-centric policies, the bank may treat the credit like a checking deposit. In cases like this, the money will be available, at the soonest, on the next business day. If your ATM messed up on Friday, this could mean funds would be unavailable until Tuesday. In certain very bad cases, funds could be tied up for a few more business days. I’m not sure why this is legal, or if it is. Banks are frequently less than 100% compliant with the regs relating to ATM credits. The regulators are more concerned with other things.

WHAT IF THE ATM DIDN’T DISPENSE THE MONEY BUT THINKS IT DID:
You should file a claim, in writing, with your bank at the next available opportunity. This is true even if you were using an ATM owned and operated by someone besides your bank, due to the way the regs are written. In some cases, contacting the non-bank ATM operator works, but they may not be able to help you.
Once your claim is filed, the bank will check for surplus funds in the ATM. If you were shorted $80 and the ATM is $80 richer than it should be, the bank will have no trouble figuring out that it needs to help you out.

ASIDE: On average at that job, the ‘bad’ ATMs on the network messed up about 1 in 1700 dispenses. The ‘bad’ ATMs tended to be older models that had accumulated a high transaction count and had accumulated weird on their mechanical elements. The ‘good’ ATMs had a lower rate of failures, although I don’t have number for them. Some seemed not to mess up a single time during the 3 months I was in that position.
As a result, if you use the ATM once a week for 50 years, unless your bank’s ATM stinks, you’ll probably never get shorted.

30

Something I’ve noticed: in both Australia and Singapore, the machines ask for your PIN as soon as you insert your card. However, in Australia, they only verify the PIN after you tell it how much you want, so it will accept any PIN the first time around. In Singapore, they check the PIN immediately.

31

Sorry, yeah ATMs, I had forgotten what the M stood for.

Yeah, this is why I imagined they would not deliver to the last bill (especially if every customer tries to see if he has better luck than the previous one in getting his amount).

Thank you **Mr. Slant ** for contributing to what makes General Questions such an awesome forum.

32

And I’ll answer as a guy who used to fill them.

There are a couple of different kinds of ATM guts.

The worst we had were the cash ones. Open the unit, pull the tray, open it up, rubber band the money and put it into a sealable bag. Some machines we were required to count it, others not. Pull out the new money (pre-debanded while you were in the truck to make it faster at the OPEN MACHINE WITH A BUNCH OF CASH IN HAND (read: where you were a tempting target*)), pop it in, close machine. Somewhere along the line, run a receipt and put it in the bag with the old cash.

Others had sealed cartridges of specific amounts of cash. Open the machine, run the receipt, slide out the old cartridges, slide in the new ones. Don’t make a mistake like my partner did one day of mixing up the $5 and $20 cartridges. Easy Peasey as long as there wasn’t something wrong with the machine.

In both cases, as you’re doing this, the machine is telling you (via the receipt) how much money it thinks it had left that you’re taking out, then you plug in the amount you are putting in. It is a computer, and it is made to count out bills, so it obviously has no problem counting out what it puts out and keeping track of what it has left. If you ask for $500 and it only has $480 left, it says no. If you then ask for $400, it will happily give it to you, knowing it has $80 left for the next guy.

But yeah, like Mr. Slant says, they can go wrong. They’re not perfect. A couple of the machines my partner and I serviced had a distressing tendency to misfeed money and jam up once or twice a week.

  • And goddamn it, these were always in the worst locations. The back of a convenience store in front of the freezers in a bad neighborhood where you’d be on your knees putting in $20k in cash with morons trying to lean over you to grab shit; one that broke down a lot in the middle of a skyway where you’re on your knees with tons of people walking right past you and half stepping over you because it was just around a turn; one in a busy downtown bar.
33

That seems to cover it, we just need another post by an ATM robber, and it will be complete.
BTW, I have read something very puzzling froms several posters here, that the ATMs would actually print the bills??! How is that even possible? Isnt that one of the essential powers of the State (I mean that’s what Mints are supposed to do not some privately owned ATMs)?

34

That was just some posters attempting to make a stupid joke.
(Or some stupid posters attempting to make a joke.) Whichever.

But this is GQ, where we try to give factual answers to questions.
So specifically, those statements about ATM’s printing money are complete falsehoods.

35

Part of my job used to be refilling an ATM every morning. It was a standalone model at a C-store, and only got filled to $2000. More than once, I was manning a cash register when it ran out of money mid-transaction. The receipt always reflected the actual dispensed amount.

As an aside, the ATM innards are much less complicated than I expected.

Joe

36

I thought only college students did this.

37

If 3 people are each asking for 90 quid each wouldn’t that be 270 pounds?

38

Nope - I’ve had to confirm my PIN after keying my amount before…(in Singapore).

39

Yes, which is why I said it could serve three people asking for forty, thirty and twenty quid, or one person asking for ninety. Not ninety each.

40

Oh really? It must vary by bank then. This is useful if you’re checking your PIN, don’t assume if the machine accepts it it must be right. Try and withdraw some money.