I made 2 cash cards/ATM cards of the same bank account abroad of mine (abroad in a sense it's not back home nor in Singapore).
One card is to be used domestically in the country where the bank is and another one is an international one to withdraw or make other possible transactions in any ATM outside the country of the issuer bank with the PLUS sign.
I gave my international cash card to my sister for her to withdraw some cash of the currency back home in any ATM with the PLUS sign back home. Of course I told her what the PIN number is also.
Apparently either because of the limit of cash that can be withdrawn in one time from an ATM back home or my sister's paranoia somehow to withdraw a big amount in one time, she withdrew once from a particular local bank's ATM one time without any problem and for some reason (I think cause the bill they had is a smaller one only at that time) she moved to a different bank's ATM to withdraw again.
And on the second bank's ATM, when she tried to withdraw, the process took longer than usual, resulting with the ATM telling her that her withdrawal request couldn't be processed. She tried again, without checking the balance and just input the amount she wanted to withdraw on the previous attempt. This time the ATM told her that the fund wasn't enough.
She was bewildered about it thinking that it's supposed to be enough, so she checked the balance this time. Imagine her surprise and mine after she told me, that the balance was already deducted with the amount of the previous attempt (that resulted in the error message saying the request couldn't be processed) even though no cash came out of the bloody ATM machine.
She went to the bank's staff to inquire and basically after some debate, the bank was telling her that since the account and the cash card is not issued by them and by the bank abroad, we should ask the issuer bank to check the transaction records of the account of that day, and returned the fund to my account if the balance in the record they have and the record in the ATM are different.
I inquired the issuer bank and basically they have the same record, so with the already wrongly deducted balance at the end. I explained that the bank of the ATM was not being cooperative and so at the end the issuer bank told me that what they can do is to request "charge back" to the bank of the ATM, to return the fund to my account of the amount that was wrongly deducted.
However, they warned me that there is no guarantee since the local bank might think that it's a fraud attempt.
And so to sort of guarantee the charge back process is going to be processed properly, I asked my sister to inquire the local bank to check the particular ATM's records of the day, comparing the amount of cash in the beginning and the end of the day and the total from the transactions done in that ATM on that day. or check their security camera to see for themselves if my sister did take some cash from the bloody machine or whatever it is that needs to be done.
However, the local bank was just saying that they can't do it and they refused to tell us why even.
If you were in my shoes, what would you do? I to be honest can't really think straight now cause of the shock still cause the amount is actually quite big *sigh*
So any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks.
may be most of the singapore or international bank has the online ebanking facility where you can look into the statement.
