If you need to pay someone in the US, it’s interesting that you can walk into the bank used by the recipient and make a deposit into their account. You just need to know their account number and IIRC that even works with cash. There is generally no fee. Sometimes tenants and landlords have that arrangement.

Anyone know if that’s possible in Europe? Does it depend on the bank? I know the conventional way in Europe is to bring cash into the post office, and the post office will take the cash and transfer the money to the recipient. But there is a transaction fee and I think a restriction as well that the payer must be a resident. Can a payer go direct to the recipient’s bank and get service, ideally without a fee?

The trend in western Europe is banks are pulling out of the ATM business and joining consortiums. Then those consortiums deploy much fewer ATMs than the banks had. And they monopolise. If one or two ATM brands reject your card, you may be fucked if it’s a small city, as I recently experienced.

ATM alternatives are becoming increasingly essential due to ATM enshitification & sparcity. Some shops give cash back, where you have more money pulled from your bank and the cashier gives you cash from the register. The US has always been on-the-ball with cash back, even though the ATMs in the US are not the shit-show that we see in Europe lately.

So it’s easy to find cash back options in the US because there are several compiled lists showing various stores and limits, like this. Some shops have a fee and some not and the range of limits vary wildly.

ATMs very rarely inform users before they put their card in the slot whether it’s the kind of machine that uses a motor to suck your card into the machine. If yes, then avoiding the machine is a good idea.

The question is, how do you find out in advance whether the machine has a motor? Obviously if you test it on your actual valid bank card that you intend to use for the transaction, you may not get it back.

So my first thought was carry expired old bank cards which can be sacrificed. Stick the card in and if a motor pulls it in, hit the cancel button and try it on the next ATM until you find an ATM that does not suck the card in. This still has issues. The machine can vary well confiscate the card merely on the basis of being expired (thus invalid). Sure, it’s a sacrificial card but I don’t have 100+ such cards to spare. And also those dead cards will have my name on them and the ATM network could blackball my name.

So my next thought is to cut a rectangle from a plastic food cont

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/6494438

I pulled money out of the wall in France and rejected DCC to ensure my bank does the conversion. The ATM had a dysfunctional receipt printer, and (unlike other ATMs) the ATM was not smart enough to mention the broken printer before the withdrawal.

Then the bank statement in the US only showed the USD amount, not the euros. Seems a bit off because I think when ATMs do a conversion they are obligated to show both currencies and the conversion rate. Why would the same transparency not be required when banks do the conversion? IIUC, the law seems to be here:

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-12/chapter-II/subchapter-A/part-205/section-205.9

And indeed I see no mention of foreign currency in the disclosure requirements.

#askFedi #lawFedi