Was it possible to comply with the snipers $ demand?

Factual Questions
1

Was it possible to comply with the snipers $ demand? and did it make sense?

This was the snipers demand:

Put $10 million in a stolen visa card account with specified pin number and activation.
They wanted unlimited withdrawal at any ATM worldwide.

Cite
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/daily/graphics/sniper/letter_102602.html

A. Was it possible to electronically comply?

B. Assuming that it is doable to put the money in and give them ATM access, (& I don’t know that) IANAATM Engineer, but don’t most ATM’s have a per transaction (circa $300) limit? Could that be over come - or would the snipers need to make over 33,000 transactions to pull $10 million out?

2

From what I know from a friend who works on ATM services in this city, doing that would actually be somewhat difficult, due to a serious Balkanization in the way that the different ATM services are run. It might be much more possible in Europe, he claimed, but it would be difficult to do in the US.

3

I think not.

Yes, they could have gotten a $10 million balance.

No, they could not have gotten unlimited withdrawl amounts. ATMs are owned by different service providers, who establish different rules for different reasons. Among the reasons they limit the size of withdrawls: to limit their own liability in case of fraud; to limit their customers’ liability in case of fraud or coersion; and to limit the on-site service visits to their machines – simply so they don’t get emptied so quickly.

4

We had some geezer in the UK try this, he was blackmailing supermarkets by putting contaminated goods on the shelves.

He was caught using an extensive police surveillance operation, but it also turns out that he was photgraphed several times whilst collecting from ATMs.
It seems that some ATMs have inbuilt video monitoring, which came as some surprise to me at the time, but those pictures of the perp proved it was so.

5

I could be mistaken,but i thought this was standard on all ATMs.

6

Most of the time it’s even pretty obvious where the camera’s at. Sometimes you can even see it.

7

Yeah, I often wave at the camera while waiting for my money.

8

From this information it is safe to assume not all marksmen are all smart men.

Can an ATM even hold 10,000,000 @ one time? Prob not, this means there would had to have been someone feeding the machine therefore this was all taking place during business hours. If it were and I was a a bank clerk and saw someone getting money out of an ATM for 8 hours it would probably strike some interest. Especially because my boss told me @ the morning meeting to be on the lookout for anyone taking unusually large amounts of money from the ATM.

Excuse me if due to all of the speculation I sound like the evening news.