Peter Farley wrote: >Curious - How do you get cash at an ATM directly from your checking or savings account without a bank debit card?
Right, your ATM card is a debit card. The question is typically whether you use it as PIN debit, as signature debit, or only as an ATM card. Signature debit has more protections than PIN debit (if your card has a Visa or Mastercard logo on it, you can use it as signature debit-that is, like it's a credit card, swiped/inserted/tapped without entering a PIN) and settlement happens after the fact, again like credit. If you use it as PIN debit, settlement is instantaneous, and as others have noted, liability is higher. The risk that makes some of us never use our ATM cards as debit cards is that those transactions run on mostly the same rails as credit transactions, including opportunities for compromise (cf. Target, Nieman-Marcus, THD, et al.). If you ONLY ever use it with a bank, you're reducing your risk significantly, since it's Someone Else's Money that will get drained in a breach. >Using a credit card to get cash from an ATM usually means drawing "Cash Advance" money on that card, which is subject to interest costs on the credit cards I own. I've used my ATM card occasionally at foreign banks to get cash. Nowadays, if I were traveling internationally, I might use my corporate credit card instead, assuming it works for that. Re card breach liability: yes, there's theoretically a $50 cap; de facto, it seems to be $0. I've never found anyone who's gotten hit for the $50, and I've asked hundreds of folks at dozens of presentations I've given on Payments. I have an unconfirmed theory that if you're a deadbeat-behind on payments, huge balance, etc.-they might try to ding you, but otherwise they're not going to risk ticking you off over pennies like that. Pennies, you say? "Don't those $50 add up?" Not in their eyes: the stats I've seen show card fraud as pretty stable, around $5-7B/year, against revenues of $300B (against transactions of $3T-note revenue = ten cents on the dollar, including late fees, interest, etc.!). Losses to fraud and bankruptcy are on the order of $50B. So they don't want fraud to increase, but aren't panicked about it at its current level, really don't care. What they worry about is that you lose confidence and stop using their cards. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
