Can anyone translate the illiterate OP?
I get that in some manner he got some amount of cash dispensed over and above what he asked for, but I cannot tell how much, how he discovered it, and what he plans to do about it. A few less "lol"s, some capitol letters, an appropriately placed apostrophe or two, and it would at least be readable. Some work on sentence structure and paragraph organization and it might actually make sense.
No. The full details simply aren’t in the OP’s text.
Does any bank staff have to pay back the money if it comes up short? Like the guy who fills the machine say? I once made a special trip back to return an extra $100 a human teller gave me by mistake, and she was so glad to see me, because she would have had to pay it herself if she’d come up short. But would the bank hold anyone working the ATM responsible?
“Excuse me sir. I speak Jive.”
idontevenknow withdrew $200 from his ATM. The bills came out kind of crooked, but he got the right amount of money.
Later at home, he checked his account activity online, and it showed a $202 debit from his account (including a $2 ATM fee), followed shortly by a $200 credit.
He’s wondering what will happen, and what he should do about it.
There’s no way to answer this question without way more details than the OP should be disclosing in a public forum.
Some ATMs are serviced by a pair of tellers who walk into the parking lot to swap out the funds and change paper.
Other are serviced from ‘behind the wall’ inside the bank.
Many at retail facilities will be serviced by one or two armed guards.
It would be down to the policy of the individual bank, cash handling (guard) firm, etc.
If your ATMs consistently come up short, it’ll be a problem.
That being said, ATM dispense faults DO happen.
If this guy got an over-dispense, there’s a good chance others will, so his failure to return that $200 won’t cost any single employee money.
aceplace has the right answer. Leave it in the account, the bank will figure it out.
If they don’t figure it out, well… that’s part of the cost of operating an ATM. The surcharges will make it up.
Thanks. But I finally figured out the OP did not get any extra money from the ATM but rather the bank credited his account incorrectly.
Sounds like the same thing to me.
Either way, the sane option is to keep some money in the account and wait a little while for someone to catch it and let him know they need to discuss it with him.
The alternative risks getting caught up in large-scale corporate BS.
The ATM will probably get counted and replenished within 2 weeks at the outside. Give it another 2 weeks to hear from the bank.
Only then consider contacting them.
That sounds very illegal in the US. I can’t speak for all banks, but for the major one I worked out, ATM refills and servicing required 2 people minimum in the room. For oversight and because it was a tricky job sometimes.
For in-person transactions at the teller window, if we were over or under by some very small amount*, it would be noted. Might get a talking to if it was consistent, but a single occurrence is no big deal, and certainly did not cost the teller a penny. A discrepancy of IIRC $1000 was a terminable offense.
*There was some leeway, like if you cracked a roll of quarters someone brought in and they only put $9.75 in there. Forget the actual amount that was okay. They gave us incentives if we were perfectly balanced X days in a row.
No, that was in the US where the teller told me she would have to have paid back the $100 shortage herself. In Texas. But this was in the 1970s, and perhaps rules have changed. It was close to Christmas too, and she was so happy that she wasn’t going to be out 100 hundred bucks – and $100 was worth a lot more back then – that it gave me the warm fuzzies for doing the right thing.
[nitpick to OP]
[pet peeve grump to the Internet]
The use of “LOL” has changed from its original, a comment in reply, to a sign by the writer that he thinks/thought that event funny, indeed, funny enough to laugh out loud. (Here nitpick turns into pet peeve.) Either trust the ability of the great Anonymous Internet readers to appreciate the humor, or write in a style that accentuates that, or throw in a comment about the situation. The little smileys are more suited to just that, a little smile you would make when retelling the story which you’re in a hurry to type.
Either that or you are truly laughing out loud as you are typing. More power to you. But I always dislike it when the teller flashes what used to be–as communication–an abbreviation of a real activity almost always, especially by respect of teller to audience, by a respondent. Now I always get the same feeling as if I’m seeing a flashing Applause sign.
[/nitpick to OP]
[/pet peeve grump to the Internet]
I think Alley Dweller has it right. Leave the $200 in there, wait for them to sort it out. If within a few months to a year, they have not sorted it out, then that’s their screw-up. It’s possible the machine has been messing up consistently and they’ll never track down which customers were short-changed and which were overpaid. If you were the only jackpot winner, they may sort it out properly.
If you waited a long time and nothing happens, then it’s between you and your conscience what to do with the windfall - fess up, or donate to charity, or buy a round of beer for the house…
I agree trying to correct the action right away may only make it worse. (I’m thinking of the Lucy show episode where the bank is short one penny an it looks like they’ll be pulling an all-nighter to find the missing cent. So Lucy tosses her own penny in the drawer and yells “I found it!” just as someone else announces they’ve found it. Now they’ll be there all night to figure out how they ended up with an extra cent.)
I wonder about the legalities of the process. This is an independent box, I assume; so they can only make withdrawals with your card information. If an ATM operator is allowed to randomly withdraw extra money after the fact from assorted accounts, I see a problem waiting to happen. To sort out these problems and make corrective transactions must involve a decent number of checks at both ends of the transactions.
the classic was the story that apparently some of these ATM machines shipped from the factory with a generic master password; it did not allow you to open the box, but some clever fellow figured out it would allow him to reprogram the tray to say it had $5 bills, not $20’s. I suspect the guy took 4 times his money, left, then let everyone else who used it share in the windfall so that recovering from the problem was made that much more difficult.
You’re thinking of this product:
http://www.learn-ethical-hacking.com/2012/03/atm-hacking-with-atm-backdoor-default.html
Not the best news article on it, but it’ll get the Interested Reader started.
By the way, I used to be on the other end of the phone when you called to let the ATM operator (we weren’t a bank, BTW) that the machine had shorted you.
If there was a problem, we’d have had to direct you to your bank.
You needed to fill out a “Regulation Z” form with the bank, named after these statutes:
Many times the bank would be expecting us to handle it.
If the customer needed, I’d get on the phone with the bank and let them know that policy was to cooperate with the bank on issuing the refund, but to have them start the process so that we didn’t have customers opening refund requests with both of us at once and confusing the crap out of people.
This policy came about because the regs I cited above provide consumer protections when the customer deals with THEIR bank, but provides no guidance at all about how independent ATM operators interact with customers.
So that everyone has the terminology, BTW, the normal phrase I heard when dealing with non-bank ATM operators was ISO (Independent Service Organization).
Irony?