Many of us have heard of incidents where people who try to withdraw money from an ATM don’t receive the amount they want, despite the amount being debited from their account. In such cases, one has to take the trouble of informing the bank about this. The bank then fixes the ‘technical issue’ and the customer receives the desired amount.
Has anyone heard of a contrary situation, where the person receives double the amount he wanted to withdraw from an ATM? This is exactly what happened with Riju Krishnan, a Senior Support Engineer at Ernst & Young, Techno Park, Trivandrum. Riju, who tried to withdraw Rs. 22,000 from an State Bank of Travancore (SBT) ATM at Peroorkada in the city, received Rs. 42,000 instead.
The irony however is that his account did not have the amount he received.
“I went to withdraw the amount I wanted from the SBT ATM at Peroorkada yesterday. As I did not have the entire amount in a single account, I decided to withdraw it from two accounts – Canara Bank and HDFC. First, I used Canara Bank’s debit card and withdrew Rs. 14,000. As the ATM prompted that only denominations of Rs. 1,000 can be withdrawn at one go, I made transactions of Rs. 10,000 and Rs. 4,000. I also received the withdrawal slip for both the transactions and received an SMS on my phone. For withdrawing the remaining Rs. 8,000, I used the HDFC debit card. I also received a withdrawal slip and SMS for the same. However, after leaving the ATM, when I checked my wallet, I came to know that I have received around Rs. 42,000,” he says.
Riju immediately contacted the police on 100. The call was received at the police control room and they did not initiate any further proceedings and asked him to contact the nearest police station instead. However, The Kochi Post has been told by the Peroorkada Police Station that there hasn’t been a complaint regarding this at the station.
With the help of one of his friends, Riju also contacted the Branch Manager of SBT, Peroorkada, and informed him about the incident. However, he was told that the bank could not identify the issue and that it would be a problem with the particular machine and the ATM has been shut. The bank authorities have also asked Riju to surrender the excess amount. However, Riju says that he would only give the money to the bank in the presence of the police as he does not want any further complications in the issue.
He also posted about the incident on Facebook and urged people to speak out if a similar experience has happened to them.
“It is our responsibility to inform the authorities regarding any such incidents. Many people neglect the small issues regarding the ATM saying that it’s time consuming to go to the bank. Maybe this could be one of the reasons why we have come across many ATM fraud cases in the recent past,” he said.
The Kochi Post also contacted Pradeep K.S., Branch Manager, with a prominent nationalised bank, in order to know more about the possibilities of such incidents taking place.
“At times such incidents can happen and there can be two possibilities. The first one being the person who had initiated a transaction just before Mr. Riju might not have received the amount and as soon as Mr. Riju instigated a new transaction, the money earlier requested might also have been ejected. The other could be a mistake that might have happened while loading the ATM machine, where the different trays allotted for different denominations may have been loaded incorrectly. For instance, if the tray dedicated to denominations of 500 is filled with 1000, then a person requesting for Rs. 500 will receive Rs. 1000,” Mr. Pradeep says.
