People who frequent Las Vegas are accustomed to putting money into machines and not getting anything back.
But that’s generally not the case with automated teller machines.
Although banks are notoriously tight-lipped about the amount of cash they cram into their ATMs, the amount is considerable. Only rarely do the machines run dry — and when they do, the transaction simply is rejected.
Most of us don’t give ATMs much thought. You probably don’t know that the first through-the-wall ATM was installed in a Barclays bank near London in 1967, or that ATMs were first networked in about 1975, or even that the second-biggest ATM-maker in the world is Diebold, right here in Green.
But no matter who’s building these things, they’re still machines, and machines don’t always work perfectly.
Such, apparently, was the case on Martin Luther King Jr. Day when Jerry E. Caplinger rolled up to the Charter One Bank branch at 1165 E. Waterloo Road in Akron.
Although Caplinger doesn’t have a Charter One account, he was willing to pay the $3 it would cost him to use the card he was given by his credit union. So he popped it in, punched in his information and waited for his $200 to roll out.
It never did. The receipt came out just fine, but no cash.
Not a big deal, he figured. The camera lens that was staring out at him from the top of the ATM would surely have recorded the transaction — or lack thereof. So off he went, planning to return the next day.
When he went back, he discovered things weren’t that simple.
Because he wasn’t a Charter One customer, he was told, his complaint would have to originate with the financial institution that issued his card.
Huh? All Charter One would have to do is check the video, right?
“HONK! Wrong!” replies Caplinger, laughing.
“I asked that very question. The lady said the machine only looks at your face. It doesn’t see anything down below.”
Still, when the tally for that day was completed, the discrepancy would have been obvious, right?
Wrong again.
“She said, ‘You have to file a dispute with your own bank, and then your bank has to wait 10 days.”
Caplinger, who retired in 2003 from his job as night supervisor for snow and ice control in the city of Akron, is in a financial position where immediate access to 200 bucks won’t make or break him. But he was steamed.
“If this would have happened to me 40 years ago when I came back from Vietnam,” he says, “I’d have probably taken that ATM out of its deposit area....
“Here’s a company that puts out a service for you to use and then basically doesn’t stand behind it.”
In some circumstances, he points out, the situation could be far worse than merely aggravating.
“What if somebody was buying a prescription for their mom or their kid or something and — boom! — you just took their last $200?”
After wrestling with my detailed email inquiry for a few days, Charter One’s media spokeswoman for Ohio passed me along to the corporate headquarters in Philadelphia. During a phone conversation, Sylvia Bronner, senior vice president of media relations, declined to address any of my questions on the record, saying she would email a statement.
The next day — seven days after my initial inquiry — she issued her statement. Here’s what it said, in its entirety:
“We review these kinds of issues according to the requirements of Regulation E, which establishes the process for resolution.”
Translation: The rules about ATM transactions are spelled out in the consumer protection laws of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
Additional translation: We’ll do the absolute minimum those laws require. We won’t even bother to say, “Sorry of the inconvenience, Mr. Caplinger.” We’re a big bank, and our industry has butt-kicking lobbyists, and the law says we don’t have to do a damn thing for nearly two weeks.
Regulation E gives a bank 10 business days to investigate such a complaint and then three more business days to report the results to the consumer.
The FDIC also says that, “if the financial institution is unable to complete its investigation within 10 business days, the institution may take up to 45 days from receipt of a notice of error to investigate and determine whether an error occurred, provided the institution ... [p]rovisionally credits the consumer’s account in the amount of the alleged error ... within 10 business days.”
Eleven days after the incident, Caplinger was notified that his account had been “provisionally” credited with $200. When he asked how long it would take for him to get unfettered access to his money, the credit union told him it didn’t know because it had to wait to hear from Charter One.
Finally, on Friday — 18 days after he was shorted — he was notified that the money was back in his account.
Gotta love it.
Bob Dyer can be reached at 330-996-3580 or bdyer@thebeaconjournal.com.