I was looking over my bank statement online, and noticed something I thought was quite peculiar. My wife had taken out $100 from an ATM not run by our bank, and I noticed the amount of the withdraw was $102.05. This, in and of itself, wasn't too strange, since most ATMs charge a fee for withdraws of non-customers, but what was strange was the $0.05.
This got me to thinking. Why the extra nickel? Did someone mean to put in $2.50 and fat-fingered it as $2.05, and no one ever noticed? Maybe as the US economy goes down the toilet, someone figured charging an extra nickel would make a difference to their bottom line. No, I had to think it more nefarious then either of those.
My brain decided (since Im a programmer by trade) that whoever wrote the software for this ATM must have done it. Imagine you get the software contract for a major ATM vendor. When each withdraw happens where a convenience fee is collected, you add $0.05 to it. You could display the normal fee, but charge the slightly increased one. Most customers would probably just ignore the fact that they were charged an extra nickel (I know I did, my wife couldn't even remember what the fee was). You create some account offshore, depositing the extra nickel into, while the real fee goes back to the bank for the ATM. If you process 10K transactions per day, across all the ATMs running this software, you'll net $500.00 per day, or just over $180K per year. Not bad change for doing nothing, and I'd bet that the number of transactions would be closer to 100K per day (if not even higher).
No one would probably ever catch on, since who's going to take the time to chase down some lost nickel? I know I wouldn't (blogging about it is a different story).
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2 comments:
I guess you've not seen Office Space, then?
Actually I have (and have the DVD), but wasn't thinking about it at the time (at least not consciously). I've also seen Superman III and Hackers, where they've done similar style schemes.
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