My Hint for Foreign ATM Machines

I’ve been meaning to write this tip up for quite a while, but now that I’ve finally gotten some closure on it, I guess now would be a decent time. While I was in Brazil, there were two ATM machine clusters across the street from eachother, both between the beach and the hostel we were staying at. The CITIbank ATMs were more reliable, but the HSBC ATMs were a bit cheaper. At first, it always seemed worth the small extra, but since I never wanted to get much out at a time, I was racking up the bank charges. Also, several people had been using the HSBC ATM without issue, so I figured I would start using that one instead as well. This worked well the first couple of times, but one of the days I went in to get some cash out, it didn’t dispense. Undeterred, I went to one of the ATM machines someone else had just (successfully) used and tried there, and withdrew the money. This time it worked.

Now, the problem was that the first transaction went through as well… it just didn’t dispense. So when I tried to call up my bank to dispute the charge, it was hard telling them which withdrawl it was, because they were both for the same amount. They ended up giving me a provisional credit(after some cajoling of the Executive Customer Service personel.. a great hint I picked up from Sharvil). Later, however, the amount was withdrawn from my account, saying that they had investigated and not figured it out. What a pain. About 6 weeks later, HSBC finally deposited the amount back into my account.

Anyways, the main lesson I learned is to try to withdraw slightly different amounts each time so that the customer service rep you talk to can figure out exactly which transaction went sour. I’m not sure if the provisional credit was revoked because they investigated the wrong withdrawal or what, but it would have been nice to know with certainty that I had told her the correct one.