[Maxious]

> just spewing out money to every piece of plastic calling itself a card when your network connection has been dropped isn't really a recipe for success.

Well they do this in Australia... http://www.news.com.au/money/banking/computer-glitch-hits-cb...

> "People were running past me screaming 'Free money! Free money!'," Punchbowl Pharmacy manager Feriale Zakhia said of the people using a nearby ATM.

> "Everyone was so happy. They were running around with huge smiles."

> [A technical problem] forced the bank to put all of their ATM machines into offline mode. Customers had no access to their account balance but were still able to withdraw money - more than their accounts held.

> Those withdrawal limits are up to $2000 a day for holders of keycards and debit Mastercards.

> "No one has received free cash," Mr Fitzgerald said. "What they've done is overdrawn their accounts. We will be following those people up and recovering that money."

[timv]

Leaving aside the fact that I wouldn't trust a newspaper to for the technical details of something like this, nothing in the article contradicts what jeremyjh said.

In that case, the ATM was disconnected from the accounting system and allowed withdrawals up to a set limit ($2000), but it (probably, the article is unclear) was still connected to the authorization system.

It (probably) still checked your PIN, and checked whether your card had been cancelled, etc. It just didn't connect through to check your balance.

As Jeremy said if for some reason we can't reach the checking account system we'll authorize up to $xxx total for the day on a stand-in basis

In this case some reason == "[A technical problem]" and xxx == $2000

[diroussel]

Which in turn agrees with the point of the original article. ATMS use BASE not ACID as it's more profitable to be available.

[GFischer]

Those humungous overdraft fees will definitely be profitable :)

BTW I've been scammed out of money by ATMs before - money was withdrawn from my account but some system jammed and I didn't get the money - and the bank was awfully uncooperative.

So far I've had more luck with the "money under the mattress" method than with banks - and I wasn't trapped in the "Corralito" or other bank-aided money-stealing schemes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito

[gbaygon]

I see that you are from Uruguay, where you in Argentina at Corralito's time? ITT Uruguay is more trustworthy in banking terms.

[GFischer]

Uruguay had a smaller Corralito (and I was just starting out at the time, so I had no money in the bank).

Ecuador and Brazil also had their own versions. In the Uruguayan version, they didn't forcibly exchange the money, but they froze all bank assets for 3 years (losing out on interest, investment opportunities, exchange rates, etc...).

Uruguay is more trustworthy (especially with foreign investment) but it's not above such things.

Currently there's a big scare due to the huge exchange rate disparity with Argentina - which has an "official" exchange rate and a "real" exchange rate which is almost double the official one, and makes Uruguay non-competitive.

Edit: you're from Argentina, that's obviously not news for you :)