£200 stolen by Barclays Bank!

bengal-stripe

oxenryd wrote: »

it's 300 therefore what Abbey have told you is ********

Maybe, what the TO has told us is ********. - Who knows???

butterfly_01

I used to work for a high street bank and we used to advise that it could take up to 28 days to resolve as we had to wait for the atm owner to reconcile their atm. Did you card issuing bank get you to fill out a form or fill out anything on their systems?

gazzer9779

The same has happened to me, except I bank with Barclays and attempted to withdraw £300 from an Abbey National ATM on the 28/11/2008. Despite 5 phonecalls and being told the money would be back in my account by a number of deadlines I have yet to get it back. (as at 12/122008)

Extant

I love the immediately panicked responses at the start about card cloning and CCTV.

This is the problem with ATMs and reciprocity: it take a really long time. Not be design, usually by volume of complaints, a lot of which are actually erroneous and are people trying it on.

Here's what usually happens:

1) The cash was "purged" - the ATM knows that no cash was dispensed, and it sends the money to a "reject" bin and lists it on the ATM's journal roll, along with your card number, card type (LINK/non LINK), blah blah blah. The Barclays staff are required to count the ATM once a week for part of their internal compliance responsibilities. When they do, they'll find this purge, and call through to the ATM Reciprocity team who will arrange a credit back to your card number.

2) Something else went wrong and the ATM hasn't recorded the problem: the machine will not balance and the over will have to be passed to an account. It then becomes Abbey's responsibility to ask for it.

3) Something else went wrong and the ATM hasn't recorded the problem, but automatically reverses the transaction: it returns to your bank account within 48 hours.

Obviously, option 1 is the preferable one - it can take up to two weeks, but you don't need to do anything.

Option 2 is more common and is probably what has happened to you. In which case, you're going to have to get to know Abbey a bit more.

Option 3 is obviously out the window.

Also, no money was "stolen." The "M" in ATM is for "machine", and somewhat unsurprisingly, they go wrong sometimes. You will get your money back, it just may unfortunately require some time. Yes, it sucks, but no, it is not an excuse to be melodramatic and start throwing around accusations of theft.

If you can, I'd suggest using your own bank's ATMs when possible in future - if you have the same problem then, there may be faster ways to resolve the issue, or they might be able to give you a temporary overdraft, pre-emptive refund, etc.

hippey

I used to work for Barclays, and what a nightmare if that barclaybank didn't balance, the dump bin was easy, the machine always seemed to reverse the transactions.

But if if was just over, then it was a case of waiting for a customer to come in, or another bank disputing it. It was always paid into the suspense account sometimes it just stayed there for months.

It was normally not possibly to see why it went wrong or was over it just happened.

With any ATM dispute contact your card issuing bank and dispute it that way, there is no way the ATM owner / bank can refund the money directly to you, that is part of the agreement interbank.

hippey

We used to deal with purges daily, has that now changed? even more of a nightmare to do!

Extant

hippey wrote: »

I used to work for Barclays, and what a nightmare if that barclaybank didn't balance, the dump bin was easy, the machine always seemed to reverse the transactions.

But if if was just over, then it was a case of waiting for a customer to come in, or another bank disputing it. It was always paid into the suspense account sometimes it just stayed there for months.

It was normally not possibly to see why it went wrong or was over it just happened.

With any ATM dispute contact your card issuing bank and dispute it that way, there is no way the ATM owner / bank can refund the money directly to you, that is part of the agreement interbank.

In 2006/2007, the oracle proforma was changed so that the ATM only needs to be balanced once a week. The only required daily check is to check the cut off balance on the journal roll to the account balance.

Service Delivery decided to change this to squeeze out all the extra up time they could - a lot of the HDM ATMs can get by with being loaded once a week, so the branch could balance and reload once a week - in theory, a branch could have no more than 20 minutes of downtime per week.

I don't know what the current deal is with ATM overs - I think they just go to overs in tills and then a central account is used for reciprocity/disputes, and just cleared to profit and loss at the end of each year.

I remember them being a pain in the !!! back in the day, but they seem... less so these days.

hippey

It has changed somewhat then!!!!

The barclaybank was the bain of my life when I moved to the cash manager role, it always seemed a bit of guess work to get it to work when it went wrong. And being targeted on up time was a nightmare, the branch where I was only had one machine outside, next to a pub in a small town, no matter how much money you put in it, it was empty on Monday morning, always giving me bad CS scores, I tried everything from filling the damn thing very last thing on friday nights with the most £20 notes you have ever seen, to passing on a sunday afternoon to see if it had run out.

It used to hold £60k, I always wondered who withdrew so much cash!

ShelfStacker_3

hippey wrote: »

It has changed somewhat then!!!!

The barclaybank was the bain of my life when I moved to the cash manager role, it always seemed a bit of guess work to get it to work when it went wrong. And being targeted on up time was a nightmare, the branch where I was only had one machine outside, next to a pub in a small town, no matter how much money you put in it, it was empty on Monday morning, always giving me bad CS scores, I tried everything from filling the damn thing very last thing on friday nights with the most £20 notes you have ever seen, to passing on a sunday afternoon to see if it had run out.

It used to hold £60k, I always wondered who withdrew so much cash!

Where abouts was this branch? Sounds like one near me (which I indeed did use quite often while on the "lemonade", if not the other bank's over the road )

Extant

hippey wrote: »

It has changed somewhat then!!!!

The barclaybank was the bain of my life when I moved to the cash manager role, it always seemed a bit of guess work to get it to work when it went wrong. And being targeted on up time was a nightmare, the branch where I was only had one machine outside, next to a pub in a small town, no matter how much money you put in it, it was empty on Monday morning, always giving me bad CS scores, I tried everything from filling the damn thing very last thing on friday nights with the most £20 notes you have ever seen, to passing on a sunday afternoon to see if it had run out.

It used to hold £60k, I always wondered who withdrew so much cash!

Yup, sounds about right. When I was a BM, I had a B6 branch, and we had a bullion run every day to feed the sodding ATMs. It was the absolute worst thing in the world when you had short staff, because you'd obviously have to help do it yourself, and get some cashiers involved (airlock system, so no less than three people doing the run).

We tried to get a hold of some extra canisters so we could fill them up in the strongroom, open the ATM, switch them out, easily done. Nope, not allowed.

On the bright side, all of the new Wincy-Nix machines seem to hold at least £160k.

Do you still work for Barclays?