Question: I have been using my debit card to withdraw money from ATMs for quite some time. However, recently, I tried to withdraw from an ATM and neither the card was ejected nor cash was dispensed. I contacted the bank immediately and reported this incident. Although the person at customer service did its best to assist by checking the ATM remotely, neither cash nor card was withdrawn. My debit card was stopped and two days after a new card was provided by the bank. However, upon checking my bank statement, it transpired that €100 were debited from my account, which is not true as no cash was dispensed. Although I complained formally to the bank, it refused to refund me the €100 which was not dispensed.
This is not the first time the Unit received complaints about ATMs failing to dispense cash or failing to dispense the full amount requested by the cardholder. As with any complaint received by the Unit, the bank is asked to provide an extract from the machine’s log report together with end-of-day reconciliation. This is a physical reconciliation much like a cashier would do at the end of day, and basically the bank checks that the actual cash agrees with the cash on the audit report. The banks’ ATMs are programmed in such a way that any malfunctions would appear on the same log report at the time of transaction. Moreover, some ATMs are also programmed to indicate not only the amounts but also from which tray cash is dispensed.
In this particular case, the bank provided extracts from the log report of the ATM and it was clear that cash had been dispensed correctly and that, at the end of the day, a full and correct reconciliation was made. The card, for some reason, was not found at the ATM.
Copies of any log reports related to the disputed transactions are given to the complainant.
