Bank won't admit fault for ATM not giving cash

dunstonh

So basically any bank can screw over a customer just because of what an ATM says? I am so mad about this as we are struggling as it is so to lose £200 to a machine is crazy.

Reverse the situation and pretend it is your cashpoint machine and its your money in the cashpoint.

Someone comes in and says they have been debited for a cash withdrawal they didnt make. You check the cashpoint and it balances. You check the audit roll and it shows that so many £20 notes and some many £10 notes were issued totalling £200. The machine shows it dished the money out, no fault occurred (as it logs faults) and the cash in the machine tallys correctly (it would be wrong by £200 otherwise). How would you view that?

I have had a response with regards to CCTV which apparently can not be viewed by anyone until the Police are involved so I will have to investigate this avenue.

That is normal.

ShelfStacker_3

PROLIANT wrote: »

I can see a scenario here, the ATM fails to pay out reporting an error, you go back and get £100, later somebody comes along and makes a withdrawal then the ATM pays the new customer his/her request + your £200, now the ATM will balance, an error may have occurred but the till balances so it is kind of catch 22.

Such a sequence of events is extremely improbable, if not impossible.

PROLIANT

ShelfStacker wrote: »

Such a sequence of events is extremely improbable, if not impossible.

I work in the IT Industry and have worked in the Electronics industry as an engineer....both hardware and software is capable of doing impossible and unpredictable actions. Concept, design, test and debug will not eliminate 100% unpredictable events. Trust me.

Briggsy.notts

Wow so many responses. Thanks everyone. I'm not giving up on this yet as it's £200 of money we can not afford to lose and I refuse to give up until every avenue has been exhausted. But I will take every view on board and do see where people are coming from but as I said it's a lot of money to have taken whether it says so or not.

To answer the question about who owns the ATM. It was inside a branch of HSBC so I guess not run by anyone else.

dunstonh

I work in the IT Industry and have worked in the Electronics industry as an engineer....both hardware and software is capable of doing impossible and unpredictable actions. Concept, design, test and debug will not eliminate 100% unpredictable events. Trust me.

What cashpoints have you written software for then? - I'll avoid those ones

If there is a dispensing fault, the cash is taken back in to the ATM and into the overflow tray.. so if the customer forgot, or was too slow in reacting, it just credits the account.

Yes. Seen these. It appears as a debit and is recredited a day or two later.

The other scenario possible is that customer forgot to take out the cash and next person standing took it as it was within the "time limit"..

I've seen that happen a few times.

The most common one ghost withdrawal turns out to be a family member who knows the PIN number.

Once upon a time, we were running short on money at the branch and the cashpoint we had was a very old style which couldnt dispense all its notes beyond a certain point. So we used to put leaflets in the back to push the money forward and put a band round it. So when it got to that stage in the hopper it would shut off the hopper as it couldnt get any more notes out. Unfortunately, on one occasion the elastic band broke and it started issuing leaflets instead of money. Quite funny looking back but at the time we had a lot of angry customers.

Another time, someone tried to commit fraud on the machine by wrapping a Burtons store card in foil (it was an old myth you could fool a machine if you did this). This was over a weekend. The machine didnt close but the foil got stuck and everyone that put their card in the machine after that had their cards kept by the machine. When we opened up the machine on the Monday morning it was overflowing with hundreds of cards. Again, loads of angry people on Monday. Many of whom blamed us for it.

Extant

ldavies wrote: »

Our machine at the beginning of the week packed up dispensing out of one of the cassettes because..

It was frozen!!

No joke, there was something like 8000 mins of downtime to explain!

If you get re-issued notes for your ATM, try blaming it on them. Saved my rear many a time for some serious downtime.

Of course this stopped working when they just started sending my branch new notes every time.

needmoney

Cchristmas week I went to withdraw £300, the machine gave me £130. I went straight into the bank and the lady said oh how strange I'll just go and see if your account says it's given you £300, it had. She said we'll have to wait til closing time to find out if it's done a 'purge' I think that means that the money is still in the machine, she took my mobile number and rung me about 5.30pm with an apology saying the money was there and they had put it straight back into my account.

Might be worth asking about their purge system.

PROLIANT

Ah the children of rules, compliance and collective.....never said that I wrote software for ATM's, just pointing out that unpredictable events occur even in the most failure intolerant environments, I forgot to remind you all of the epic technological failures throughout history, nothing is infallible - a factual statement to take note of. :rolleyes:

Extant

PROLIANT wrote: »

Ah the children of rules, compliance and collective.....never said that I wrote software for ATM's, just pointing out that unpredictable events occur even in the most failure intolerant environments, I forgot to remind you all of the epic technological failures throughout history, nothing is infallible - a factual statement to take note of. :rolleyes:

I wouldn't go so far as to agree with what they said - it's not impossible, but it is highly improbable. To get to the scenario you gave would require multiple errors happening in sequence, covering both software and mechanical faults - and even then they would have to happen in a very specific order for the customer to be able to get more money than requested and for it to not then show up anywhere and for the issue to never occur again, or cause other problems around the same time. In terms of probability you'd have to be talking about several zeroes after the point.

PROLIANT

BarclaysManager wrote: »

I wouldn't go so far as to agree with what they said - it's not impossible, but it is highly improbable. To get to the scenario you gave would require multiple errors happening in sequence, covering both software and mechanical faults - and even then they would have to happen in a very specific order for the customer to be able to get more money than requested and for it to not then show up anywhere and for the issue to never occur again, or cause other problems around the same time. In terms of probability you'd have to be talking about several zeroes after the point.

The probability of a set in the σ-algebra is defined as
where the integration is with respect to the measure induced by