Slashdot Mirror
Our ATM Is Broken, Go To Jail
Actually, I do RTFA writes "This community recently discussed possible criminal prosecution for people who took advantage of faulty slot machine software. At the time, many here drew an analogy to a hypothetical ATM that dispensed too much money. Well, apparently, that too may result in criminal charges. Although they suspect that someone may have tampered with the ATM, they are considering charging anyone who got extra money from it." Here is an editorial musing on the morality of such unexpected windfalls.
Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
A couple of 30-somethings embark on the ultimate roadtrip
How about employers who make direct deposits to your bank account and then, four weeks later, send a collection notice saying,"Ooops. We overpaid you."
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
This is yet more evidence of how materialistic our society has become. It is NOT a crime to not report the observation of a beating or death. Yet it is a crime to take advantage of a faulty slot machine? Something is F'd. Big business has too damned much influence over the laws of this country. They don't care if people die as long as they get their fucking loot back.
Table-ized A.I.
Where is there an ATM that does anything in increments other than 20?
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
as the article says, the machine knows who got too much money and didn't come forward about it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
when that bank errors in your favor, your screwed but when the bank errors in their favor, your screwed?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Didn't your local friendly MMORPG teach you the consequences of exploiting bugs?
Seriously, just because you were not the one who hacked the thing, doesn't give you the right to exploit the flow. It's like stealing stuff from a shop because the window was broken by someone else.
Accidents do happen, and it should be the burden of the prosecution to prove the defendant knew of the exploit, and not vice versa, but if you see someone withdrawing 1 grand (max daily limit) from a machine that happens to give out $20s instead of $5s (especially if person never previously withdrew such large amounts), and of course the person conveniently "forgot" to check the amount he got, then you got a pretty good circumstantial case of malicious intent, and then the defendant better have some good justification for these actions.
Because bank lines were cut, some banks did NOT turn off their Manhattan ATMs so that customers could obtain emergency cash. Of course, when this was discovered, this was abused. I havent heard of the followups of any persecutions, if any.
FEMA disbursed cash with low identity proof threshholds because the assumption was many people lost their IDs during the disaster. This was abused (and mocked in the media). FEMA is trying to collect the cash, but many of the thieves dont have much. Its a dilemma: damned if you are too tight with aid; damned if you are too loose.
I personally ran into this problem myself. Back a couple of years ago, I drove up to my bank to get some cash. A guy came out of the ATM with a big sh*t eating grin on his face. I went in and chose to get $60 cash and was then handed $120. Just my luck!
When I came out, he asked if the same thing had happened to me and I said yes. We both left and went about our ways.
An article showed up in the news paper that had explained that a programming up date that had been updated that day had caused the machine to dispense double your withdrawal. In turn, the bank would withdraw the money from your account for the additional money that was dispensed.
I would think that they should eat it as it was their mistake (they have insurance), but the other side of it is that I don't think I should go to jail for some guys programming error.
Mine only included a clause pertaining to bank or in transit errors: not deliberate deposits by the company.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
So, there are some people who took advantage of an ATM defect (whether bug, intentional, or accidental programming error, error in loading cash, whatever.)
The bank knows who they are.
Why don't they just debit their accounts the correct amounts and forget about it?
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
How big must the 'windfall' be before we report it? When you're checking out at the supermarket and you notice your item rang up for $2.99 instead of $3.99 that it was supposed to, do you say something? Most of us probably wouldn't say anything, but would raise hell if it was supposed to be $3.99 and it rang up for $4.99. If it's just a $1 difference in our favor, we don't report and let it slide even though we know it's an error in their system. Is that now a crime? If not, then where do we draw the line? If $1 in our favor is not a crime, but say $100 in our favor is, what's the cutoff? Does this just apply to ATM/Slot machines? What if I bought ten items that were $1 off, do I report it then? How about fifty of those items?
It just seems to raise too many questions.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
Your groceries come to $7 something, you hand her a $10, she gives you $12 something (ie. change for a $20). What do you do? I've seen two reactions to this: what I've seen my parents' do... I tell her I only gave her a $10 and worked it out. Did that in front of a friend and no amount of reasoning seems to stop his whining:
him: "You idiot! You could have had $10 bucks."
me: "It's not screwing the man... she's responsible for her till."
him: "It's like she dropped it on the street and you found it."
me: "Not even close... it's like I SAW her drop it and have the chance to return it."
Aannnnd... end scene. I seriously could not understand his reasoning and he couldn't understand mine.
Although, I have to admit, if something rings up lower than it's real price and the cashier wont get screwed, I'll probably not say anything.
Anyone else?
The face-to-face equivalent of this is: you purchase a $5 item. You hand the clerk a $20 bill, He/she proceeds to give you three 20's in change instead of 3 5's. If you choose to say nothing and keep the money, then (1)is that "wrong," and (2)is that theft?
For the most part, honesty and fair play normally demands that you point out the error. After all, anyone can make a mistake when distracted, and the bottom line is that money will come out of the (probably very poorly paid) employee's pocket when the register doesn't balance at the end of the day. For me, I would be honest most of the time, but it depends on how I've been treated in the course of the transaction. For example, once at a Wal-Mart the clerk clearly rang the purchase up wrong, and gave me about $10 too much in change. When I politely tried to point that out to her, she got very huffy and defensive and insisted that I didn't know what I was talking about and that she did not make such mistakes. Needless to say, I pocketed THAT Hamilton. But is that "theft?" The possibility never occurred to me, and I've never heard of anyone being arrested for getting too much change and not returning it.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Easy - Simply don't give them authority to do it. Deposits don't require authority. Withdrawls require a signed mandate on record from yourself. Or do banks in the US simply allow anyone who says so to take money out of your account?
taking stuff that don't belong to you is theft. Which part of this concept is so hard to understand???
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Since ATMs are opaque and you cannot see the contents of the money bins until you have taken money out, you have to do the "crime" before you can know that the ATM is misconfigured. Thus you are already a criminal. That doesn't make sense. Crime has to have an element of intent. If your only intent was to withdraw money owned by you from your own account, clearly no wrongdoing was intended.
But going back for seconds, after having noticed the mistake... now you're talking criminal intent.
--
I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
But for a while now I've taken it on faith that when i withdraw $100 in $20 bills I get 5 bills. I take the money and stuff it in my wallet without counting it, mostly because sometimes I withdraw from not the safest neighborhoods and I don't want to be standing around flashing cash while I count.
Does this mean that if I am guilty of being lazy/preoccupied/safety conscious and not count my money after withdrawal I could go to jail?
Clearly your bank is superior to mine.
Sam
IMHO these people are certainly guilty of something, though IINAL so I don't know exactly what. They took advantage of a situation and took money they clearly realized was not theirs. I don't think this is any different than walking out of a store without paying if you get to the front and find the cashier is in the bathroom. I've said it before, these are not difficult decisions; you know what's right, you just need to choose to do it. "Stickin' it to the man" is simply rationalization of your own immorality.
What's sad here is that apparently a couple dozen people found out about this and it nobody had the honesty to report it.
Maybe they got some of their voting machine code in there by mistake.
if (Republican)
{
Total += 20;
}
My solution to situations like these which makes me feel morally happy is to inform the relevant person/business and then let them fix it. If they don't then I take it to mean that they don't care and are happy for me to keep the money. The nice thing with this is that generally the companies which give rubbish service end up screwing themselves since they are ignore my informing them.
For example when getting too much (or too little) change returned I'll point it out and then it gets fixed right away. However as a grad student we had a really terrible company running the pay phone in our student hostel who would take ages to fix problems and never refunded money when the phone swallowed money without giving credit. So when burglars broke open the cash box below the phone we informed the company and true to form it took them over a week to send anyone to fix it. Lets just say that in that time we all more than recouped the cost of all the money it had swallowed previously (it was in the UK and we had an American, Italian, Australian and Malaysian in the hostel in the time before really cheap international calling!).
The nice thing was that because we had informed the company of the break in and damage in advance when they tried to recoup the missing money from the college they (and us) were covered legally (they refused to respond in a timely manner and therefore were liable). The other great thing about this was that afterwards response times on problems dropped to same/next day!
So does this count as completely moral behaviour? Given that the same company had screwed us in the past by not refunding money swallowed by the machine, that we did inform them of the issue beforehand and that I was not one of the people making long, expensive international phone calls I did not have a problem with it. Indeed I think it was a rather good example of poetic justice.
It is quite probable that someone used your son's bank account to laundry money. Some guys in that line of work may make it appear that it was _you_. I would report it in writing to the bank, with a receipt, that I would keep carefully.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
A few states have laws (often improperly referred to as Good Samaritan laws, e.g. the finale of Seinfeld) that require you to provide assistance to victims of crimes/torts. However, these are the gross minority.
Almost every state places absolutely no burden on anyone to help anyone else, unless they have a pre-existing duty (e.g. you're their caretaker, parent, etc.).
"Stumble before you crawl"
I deposit money into my sisters BoA account regularly at the drive-through. I just drive up with an account number and a deposit slip. Have a nice day...what REALLY bothers me is the fact that I'm 6'3" and hairy and they still give me suckers.
Isn't that weird about our culture? We punish bad behaviour with a vengeance, but rarely do we reward good behaviour.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
I didn't come across a lot of posts from /.'s who've worked in financial institutions. So, let me clear some things up. Forgive me if the exact details are off but it's been almost 10 years since i worked on the customer service side.
/. said that he o
- Any large cash transaction needs to be reported. I believe the amount is $10,000. You can deposit checks that are larger than this amount, and they do not need to be reported. There should be no way around this, even if you make 2 separate deposits at two different times on the same business day. A total $10,000/min limit exists for this report. And for those of you wondering, this isn't an uncommon event in a bank that works with businesses primarily.
- All money is accounted for, and double checked. So if you "deposit" more money than you were supposed to, its actually really easy to find out who's it is at the end of the day. Believe it or not, it is also easy when the CSR is short to find out who owes the money. Once the error is found, it is fixed immediately by debiting or crediting your account.
- There is nothing you can't do in a bank. If you have a check to deposit, and they want to put a 1 part or multiple part hold, don't be afraid to ask them to release more of the money right away or sooner. Oh wait that has nothing to do with this, but is still helpful. Always talk calmly and don't get upset!! The bank can almost always help you out.
- Accepting deposits has never been a problem, and even though bank of america sucks, and might require some form of ID, if i recall correctly, as long as they get "A" form of id, they'll take the deposit. I have done this for a friend many years ago, and they took my drivers license as the ID.
- Withdrawing money is a different story all together. When i worked on the CSR side, we were required to contact the customers home branch and request a fax of their signature card. That card is exactly what it sounds like, a card with their signature, but with a date and a bit of other useless info. The customer always has to sign a withdrawal slip or a check to cash on the spot, so you have proof of their signature. You compare that signature to the signature cards and if it's a match or close enough, they get their cash. When customers change their signature, and this is admitted on their behalf, then they are given a chance to write out their old signature. If the signature was close, then we'd look at the other info on the card to try to prove that it really is the account owner.
- With cards having magnetic stripes now, this is much safer, as long as no one has your PIN. But the signature above part is still important in case the ATM eats your card or it's lost/stolen. So make sure you take care when signing for a new bank account.
- ATMs are stocked with a LOT of cash at some point of the day, sometimes multiple times. Although i never really got to get a GOOD look at the machines, i was assured by everyone and the techs who went out to service them that "they don't make mistakes." Now, check my signature
- When an ATM dispenses money and it doesn't add up when the machines are checked, you pull up the records of it's transactions. And like i said before, and difference is easily found. In the cases that i've been aware of where large sums of money were paid out once or repeatedly, their cameras have come into play to help identify the end user. Regardless, the card holder is responsible. If the card was stolen, used and an extra $3,000 paid out, the account holder is responsible. That is why you MUST call and report your lost/stolen card immediately!
- If you are even short changed at an ATM, make sure to report it immediately to the branch if they are operating under normal business hours. If they are closed, call it in immediately and find out what you are required to do. Under normal circumstances you will get your money either through credit to your account or cash on the spot.
- One guy on
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
It would depend on the ATM machine, the location, and the amount I withdrew.
$20 at a convenience store in a good neighbourhood during the day, I'd certainly count the cash.
A large withdrawal at a bank-run ATM at midnight downtown, I would trust the bank rather then show the world just how much cash I have in my pocket.
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...
My wife and I both had this happen. Mine was in the military. They divided the overpayment into 6 months and took that much out of my paychecks. It was only $300 total though so it was $25 a paycheck. For my wife, it too was only several hundred dollars but at a private company. They took it out over a the next two pay periods. I've heard stories about companies taking back huge amounts all at once. IMHO, that is fair provided they give you some heads up though in case you moved it out of your checking account for what ever reason [1]. You should have a rough idea of how much you should be paid. If you spent that extra $1400 you got for no apparent reason, that is your fault.
[1] my wife an I have not balanced our checking account for at least 15 years. I browse the statements online but that is it. Roughly once a month, one of us transfers all but about $2000 from checking. As the month goes on, if we need to or happen to spend more in a single month or it is more then a week or so from a payday and there is less then $1000 in checking, I will transfer enough back to maintain at least $1000 in there. Using this method, we have NEVER bounced a check or had insufficient funds for a payment in the 18 years we have had a joint account. My mother in law maintains her account to the freaking penny, keeps track of and saves every single reciept from every single non cash transaction she makes. She has never bounced a check either. The difference is she spends hours a month maintaining it, we spend about 2 minutes.
Breaking a machine, or in this case taking advantage as a broken machine is criminal activity. But unless I can prosecute the CEO of bank for criminal negligence when I have no money for week due to the firms mistake, then I don't see how the bank should charge me for criminal activity when their machines give me $400 instead of $100.
...
The first time is an accident and you should not go to jail. However, if you continue asking for $100 then you are knowingly comitting a crime and should go to jail. I expect that the people to be prosecuted are those who engaged in the latter.
They can bankrupt me with no significant repercussion
You can sue them. And if the CEO knowingly repeatedly "improperly credits a bad check" he can go to jail to. Things seem perfectly symetrical to me. Either compare one accident to one accident or repeated abuse to repeated abuse, not one accident to repeated abuse.
You're missing GP's point. There's a reason there are square quotes around "crime" the first time around in that quote; it's a reductio argument, in favor of precisely the conclusion you're "correcting" GP towards.
You've also missed GP's bigger point:
Now I bet you that is the real issue here behind the possibility of prosecution. If you knowingly, with premeditation and planning, withdraw money from an ATM that's dispensing too much money, well, that's clearly theft, and the cops sure better try to see if they can catch and prosecute.
And TFA certainly suggests this is what's happened:
So, the suspicion is that somebody went out of their way to go to that ATM acting on the knowledge that it was handing out excess money, with the intent to take advantage of this fact; and that somebody may have rigged the machine, too.
The people who used this ATM during the time in question will be checked out. The cops's first priority will be to find the ones that carried out a relatively clear theft as described above. Threats of prosecution may be made towards some who didn't, in order to get them to spill the beans about telling their pals to come take advantage of the ATM. Most of the people who used the ATM will probably not be worth prosecuting for anything more than a misdemeanor, if at all.
Are you adequate?
And that's really how it should be. I'm not going to help anyone if I don't have the means to do so. If I've got a cell phone, I call 911 for them. If I don't have my phone on me, well, it's sadly not my problem and I can't do anything about it. If there's something I can do, I will, but that's usually not the case. Having the law require me to help would not be a good idea.
Good to see you didn't
morcego
Banks can make significant amounts of money by intentionally ripping off customers and making it difficult to get their money as a matter policy. A customer may have the right to sue but it is unrealistic to think that is a viable possiblity for most people.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
While I sympathise with your predicament, my experience is that the situation isn't that lopsided.
First of all, IANAL, so take this just as someone searching Wikipedia for you, with the usual caveats that means. I say that because I'll take a bit of a legal definitions detour, but that's not really that necessary to illustrate the _moral_ point I'm making, so feel free to skip it if you want to.
The key element in any conviction in the western law system is the "Mens Rea", or "evil intent". (Well, literally "evil mind".) There are various degrees of it, ranging from premeditation (you actually planned ahead to do harm) to negligence (a reasonable person of average intelligence should have seen how an otherwise well meant plan could go wrong and harm someone.) "Criminal negligence" is somewhat a misnomer, in that it's usually not criminally punished, unless it was "gross negligence", meaning it involved "wanton disregard for human life". I.e., unless an ATM was dangling from the ceiling and fell on you, it won't qualify as such.
You'll probably have no case at all, even civil, unless it's the previous degree, namely "Willful blindness". I.e., someone had more than ample warnings that something can go bad, or it was blindingly obvious that it will cause harm, but they choose to pretend the problem doesn't exist.
Why I took that legal definitions detour is because it codifies the basic underlying moral idea: was it deliberate? Did that person _intend_ to do something wrong? Did they _know_ they did something wrong? Did they do anything to rectify the problem _if_ they became aware of it?
(Also, I don't know about the USA, but in Europe we have this clause that you can't keep an undeserved gain, even if it was an error. E.g., if you transferred some money to the wrong account by mistake, even if the recipient didn't know about it, they still have to give you your money back. That's another codifying a basic moral idea: money gotten by someone's error aren't yours to keep.)
And in that aspect, the bank doesn't seem guilty at all to me, and the situation isn't as equivalent as you paint it. Sorry.
1. The bank certainly didn't intend to rip you off there, and they _do_ correct it when they become aware of the problem.
1.a. I can assure you (well, second hand, because I have friends who worked for banks) that banking software is among the most tested and reviewed software ever made, ranking up there with the stuff they run in airplane control systems. Banks not only are more carefully monitored by the government, but also live by their reputation and face bigger money problems. Noone wants software who makes gross mistakes. And not just for little fish like you and me, but they also deal with massive corporate funds. Software which gets a brain-fart for a $100 transaction, well, you can see the problems it could cause when it does a $100,000,000 transfer for a takeover.
Most of the problems involving banks are human errors, like an absent-minded dolt putting a pack of $100 notes in the $10 tray of the ATM. And even those are very rare, actually.
1.b. At any rate, they _do_ fix the problem when they aware of it, and even offer assistance for your own problems, like when you entered the wrong sum or destination account. (As a personal anecdote, they sure have been nice and helpful when I typoed the sum I transferred to my insurance... by omitting the decimal point.)
And to get back to that moral point, you can't fault them for not automatically fixing something they don't even know about. So until you go tell them about it, wtf do you expect? Telepathy? By your own tale, you needed exactly _one_ trip to the bank to solve it, which doesn't seem that tragic.
2. By comparison the folks ripping off an ATMs and the like are not in the same category at all. You do count the money you get from the ATM, don't you? So you'd _know_ something went wrong. Plus there are cases where it's been deliberate by any reckoning. There are people who went back and took
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Here in Argentina a woman won 30.000.000 in a slot machine, she took a pic with her cell phone of the machine saying so. The casino claimed that the machine was broken and that those machines don't offer that much money, 30.000 at most. So they offered her that amount. She is suing them. Now all slot machines are required to have a banner that states the maximum prize.
Nobody ever heard of the slot programmer again...
I usually do a quick count of the money I get from an ATM. On the other hand, I'm close to six feet tall, I have a heavy beard and I can look like the type that would love to beat you up if you tried something stupid. I also tend to use ATMs in 'safe' locations while staying very aware of the environment.
Other people may not feel safe about doing a count, especially if they can see at a glance that they got X bills when they were expecting X bills. Thus a request for $75 could result in 6 bills, three $20s and three $5s and result in a total of $120 if the $5s were actually $20s.
If this person already has some cash in their wallet, they may not realize what happened.
And if this person is elderly, female, invalid, handling infants or small children, or some in some other vulnerable state, they might forego the counting, especially if the ATM is in an unsafe location.