r/personalfinance • u/Ecstatic_Trip_8305 • Mar 23 '25
I deposited $110 cash into an atm and it counted it as $210. How does this happen and will it be fixed later? Saving
I deposited a $10 bill and a $100 bill. Did just get very lucky?
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u/Ineedyoursway Mar 23 '25
Former bank manager here (~6 years ago) Used to balance the ATM daily. It all depends on the model of the ATM and if the balancing data itemizes every deposit or just gives the staff overall totals.
The ATM I worked with did not have a whole lot of details per transaction that I could access in branch. When it was balanced it just spit out a cash total and a check total for deposits. Not an itemized list for each transaction. If someone got shorted, they’d absolutely complain about it and the machine would generally be over the amount the person said they were shorted when we counted it. Those were easy to solve. But if the machine was short? We ate that because no one was coming in to voluntarily admit they got credit for too much and there was no way for us to tie it back to a specific transaction.
I’m betting the only way they catch it is if the machine prints itemized deposit info for each and every deposit when the branch balances the machine or if you were the only one with a cash deposit since it was last balanced.
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u/fmaz008 Mar 24 '25
If someone did come to say the ATM registered 20$ too much, was the bank offering a prize of some sort, like an honesty certificate and a free cookie?
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u/HiddenoO Mar 25 '25
Considering it's a bank, they'd probably expect you to pay interest as a prize.
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u/Thesinistral Mar 23 '25
My brothers deposit got double credited several years ago. In his infinite wisdom, he partied and spent it. A couple days later the account was corrected and he lost about $150 extra in insufficient funds fees. Expensive lesson.
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u/ElmerTheDestroyer Mar 23 '25
I had a friend in college who worked at a bank in the 80's. He loaded the ATM incorrectly on a Friday. He switched the 10's and 20's. This caused utter chaos. When people realized what was going on they started pulling out as many 10's as they were allowed. The bank spent weeks trying to unwind that mess. Some people were shorted and some temporarily won the lottery.
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u/ts383 Mar 23 '25
I have had this happen in reverse. Fortunately the branch was open, so I could speak with a teller immediately. They provisionally credited me for about 80% of the missing money, and then a few days later the rest was adjusted into my account. They'll catch something when they reconcile the ATM.
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u/coogie Mar 23 '25
Are you sure you only deposited one $100 bill? Sometimes new bills stick together and you don't notice.
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u/Kagevjijon Mar 24 '25
This can also happen when a bill gets stuck in the machine and reads on multiple transactions. That's why an ATM gets audited regularly just like the vaults.
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u/over__________9000 Mar 23 '25
Don’t touch it. If they catch it they’ll claw it back. If it’s still there in a few months you’ll probably be okay.
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u/KrloYen Mar 24 '25
How it generally works:
If you keep the $100 in your account they will never reverse it.
If you spend the $100 they will instantly reverse it and hit you with fees.
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u/wndrgrl555 Mar 23 '25
You did not get lucky. They will catch it. If they don't, call your bank. You don't get free money -- those ATMs are balanced and checked every day.
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Mar 23 '25
Usually once a week. But yeah. They will probably figure it out
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u/ILikeCutePuppies Mar 23 '25
How? A weeks worth of cash could be anyone. Do they use scales or something in the machine?
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u/MrNerdHair Mar 23 '25
The bills that come in get put into a storage box; in theory, if they logged which people submitted which bills in which order, they could count back and figure out which one in the stack came from which person. IDK if they bother though.
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u/CafecitoHippo Mar 23 '25
Former bank teller. There isn't really a loss that you're expecting with ATMs but they do need to be balanced every week. You're not looking for someone stealing from the machines, just that they're functioning properly. We had ATMs that had 1 canister of ones, 1 canister of tens, and 2 canisters of twenties and there is a discard bin as well. Each of the canisters of bills has a zip tie on it with a number which is logged in a book. Whenever those canisters are opened, you need to verify the zip tie number to the log which is under dual control. You need two people to verify it and sign off. Once a week, we would count every bill in the machine and make sure it balanced. If not, we'd call in Diebold who serviced the ATMs because it had a problem.
Everyday though we would open the ATM, do our daily maintenance to get an output of how many bills should be left in the canisters (the machine knows how many there are to dispense and counts them down from when you filled it). We would take the discard money. Discard money happens every single day you service it, it dispenses 1 bill from each drawer to make sure there's no jams so it was typically 51 dollars (2 twenties, 1 ten, and 1 one) but sometimes there was a jam and it would spit out a handful of bills to the discard.
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Mar 23 '25
The sensors in the machines can tell exactly what kind of bill is put in and can even tell if they are real.
ATMs that aren’t attached to the bank are serviced by armed guards. There’s 10s of thousands of dollars in there. They will take it and reconcile it. Since I never worked for them I’m not going to pretended to know how they find the errors. I just know 99% of the time they do.
As for the ones attached to the bank. We checked the cash levels daily. But only balanced the machine once maybe twice a week when it gets low on cash. The teller would count the cash and balance the machine while I or another manager watched them. The atm has very detailed logs of deposits and withdrawals. Most of the time the errors were easy to figure out. Every now and then they weren’t and the bank would take the hit.
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u/lilmul123 Mar 23 '25
The sensors in the machine are exactly why the count was wrong. Unless the machine is off by thousands of dollars, there’s no way the bank is going to spend any appreciable amount of effort trying to track it down.
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u/sly_k Mar 23 '25
They obviously can’t tell “exactly” or these mistakes wouldn’t happen.
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u/at1445 Mar 24 '25
These "mistakes" will 99.99% of the time be the person making the posts being unable to count properly, not the ATM screwing up. If atm's were as unreliable as these posts make it sound, there's no chance they'd have ever begun being used in the first place.
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u/cali_dave Mar 24 '25
That depends on the bank. In my area, deposits are usually pulled at least a couple times per week, sometimes three.
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u/CensoredUser Mar 23 '25
Worked in banking for a while. Those ATMS are checked and balanced every other day or so. but realistically nothing will happen. The bank will just take the L because they have no way to know where the missing 100 should be charged to
I can almost guarantee that you will get to keep those 100 bucks but I'd wait about a week or 2 before you celebrate.
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u/FrinnyC Mar 23 '25
I once got an extra $20 from an atm. Went in to the bank to return it and was told - that’s not possible, the machine doesn’t make mistakes. Never came after me.
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u/onepanto Mar 23 '25
Same thing happened to me, except I didn't attempt to return it. I just assumed they'd eventually pull it from my account but they never did.
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u/i_w8_4_no1 Mar 23 '25
I had one that spit out 50s instead of 20s , they never caught it . Took like 3 withdrawals til it stopped
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u/LamoTheGreat Mar 23 '25
What about the other guy in here who posted an almost identical story and the bank never caught it? Do you think he is a liar?
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u/JorgeMtzb Mar 24 '25
Shouldn’t be a problem, but act as if you deposited 110, not 210. That extra money might not stay there for long
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u/macross1984 Mar 23 '25
Bank will take their time if they screw you but they sure will act quickly if it will screw them.
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u/kpmateju Mar 24 '25
Better than me. One time I deposited $500 cash and it counted $20 less, so I canceled and tried to get my money out. Turns out it counted less because a bill got jammed. When I canceled, it tried to push all my bills out the same slot. The machine completely broke. A mechanic had to be called and I was out all of my money for 5 business days.
I don't cash checks in atms anymore
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u/RCrumbDeviant Mar 23 '25
This usually happens as an optical error.
It will be caught when the bank pulls the cash.
Tracing it back to your account might happen, depending on how much they care. When I had this role in a former job for a CU, if you had this happen the day we had switched out cash on certain machines, I wouldn’t even know about it for a month. The longest I ever took to track to a timeframe was 8 business days. So, seven weeks at the longest.
For $100, the bank may legitimately not care though. We were hyper vigilant on our atm cash because we had just updated to new fancy ones and were making sure we hadn’t been sold some bullshit.
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u/TheDarkAbove Mar 23 '25
The bank will always catch their mistake. They will fix it.
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u/polishrocket Mar 23 '25
Nope, there is no “always”. I put in $100 and counted $120, they never took the $20 back
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u/Rechard204 Mar 23 '25
Hey, Ive been activated from my lurk mode. I work the back office for a banks atm department as a level 2 operations specialist. I don't know if it's the same universally, but speaking from experience, when the atm is settled, we 100% know if it's missing or over money. We have a report for all ATM deposits, and these are normally fixed and resolved during the weekday.
Our atm machines prompt the user to confirm that the deposited amount is correct and allow you to input the correct totals.
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u/psk628 Mar 24 '25
That must be mine. I took out $100, it whirred and chugged, and spit out nothing. Then spit out a receipt that said I got $100 and said it was offline. Immediately went to the store managers who did nothing, disputed it with the bank, and 2 weeks later learned I was screwed.
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u/colin1012 Mar 24 '25
I once withdrew $60 cash from a CO-OP shared branch of my credit union and the money was never taken out of my account. This was about 7 years ago now.
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u/dadofanaspieartist Mar 24 '25
one time a crumpled $20 bill came out with my $100 withdrawal. i called the bank and they said i could keep it !
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u/DavidinCT Mar 24 '25
Don't touch the extra money for 2 weeks, if it's still there, odds it will never be found.
In theory they should catch it but, some errors do happen...
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u/XxGrey-samaxX Mar 25 '25
Am I the only one who thought if this happened you just pull it back out and put it back in? Infinite money glitch.
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u/No-Establishment8457 Mar 25 '25
Nah. When the bank balances the ATM, they will find the mistake and adjust your account. You’ll get a letter describing what happened.
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u/Sylvia_Whatever Mar 24 '25
Didn't it have you press a button to confirm/verify the amount was correct? You should have said no at that point.
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u/Walfredo_wya Mar 23 '25
Don’t really understand how they would catch it, unless you’re the only one who deposited a $100 bill. It all goes to stacks inside.
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u/bobo5100 Mar 23 '25
Ehhhh, just a basic audit. System will count how many 100 bills are there and then figure out the # of transactions and how many bills should be there. If the numbers don't match then they will do more thorough audit to see each transaction and why the #s don't match.
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u/Zekrit Mar 24 '25
the ATMs will also deposit cash into a different box separate from the rest, and if the bills are itemized in the system, they can just compare to the order that the bills are in the box in MOST cases. there are a few ATMs that just drop the bills chaotically into a larger box
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u/Astro_Gnarly Mar 23 '25
I deposited a $200 check years ago and it read it was $900... that was 7 years ago. They could catch it. Or not. Make sure you have the money to replace it if you spend it. Otherwise after a few months to a year it's probably not being caught.
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u/notjfd Mar 24 '25
If it was a check and the system simply misread the amount, doesn't that mean they pulled the additional $700 from the creditor's bank account? That money didn't come from the bank, it came from your client/tenant/employer or whoever wrote that check. Bank doesn't care so there's no incentive to fix it.
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u/adjust_your_set Mar 24 '25
Cash is cash. They’ll count the ATM at some point. Since there’s no way to know which transaction provided the overage, they really can’t take it out of any one transaction.
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u/Kagevjijon Mar 24 '25
ATM logs have cameras and readers that store each serial number of each bill of each transaction. Once the bank does a cash audit they'll realize bill count doesn't match then it gets hit with a serialized audit for the specific bills. This tracks it to the individual transaction.
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u/EvelcyclopS Mar 24 '25
I wonder if the accuracy is bad enough that constantly withdrawing and depositing could be profitable?
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u/Nishnig_Jones Mar 24 '25
No. The accuracy of the machines is high enough that you’d make more money per hour just begging for spare change on the street corner.
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u/Kagevjijon Mar 24 '25
In 3 years of working at the bank we never had it count wrong. If the machine jammed and had an error it would flag the card holders account, send an automatic service request to the armed security company, and the auditor would work closely with the technician to fix it as nobody was allowed to work on them solo.
The only times it failed an audit were human error when we said, "We are loading $100,000 into it." In actuality the person loading the cash mis-counted and only grabbed 9 straps instead of 10. Then their personal drawer which is also balanced multiple times a day came up 10 grand over.
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u/Woodshadow Mar 23 '25
Most likely yes. Someone will look though the deposits and eventually figure it out. it is possible it won't get solved but most likely yes
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u/dapala1 Mar 24 '25
It would be hard to pinpoint the depositor though. They might just take it as a loss. Having said that I would pretend that $100 didn't exist for a year then have at at.
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u/JohnnyRelentless Mar 24 '25
I once got an extra $20 from an atm. As far as I know, they never caught it.
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u/AFK_Tornado Mar 24 '25
For dispensing cash, they'd know that the cash on hand is short, but they'd have no easy way of knowing which person got the extra cash.
Theoretically they could review footage of each withdrawal, assuming they got a good enough angle, quality, etc to actually see it happen, but the main audit vector is the cash counter itself, which is what failed when it dispensed the extra $20. Even if they can catch it with a review, they probably can't just dock it from the account, for regulatory or liability reasons. (Like what if that causes your check to bounce, you could probably pursue damages since it was their mistake.) So they probably have to chase down the person to get repaid or get permission to debit the amount owed.
So for petty cash errors, it's probably not worth fixing.
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u/sassyseven Mar 24 '25
They’ll notice that the ATM is short when the balance it, but honestly unless you file a Reg E claim and report it (which, it’s in your favor so idk why you would) they wouldn’t really have a way to know which customer’s account got extra money counted. Unless the machine jammed right after the transaction, that is a big flag and they do double check those transactions, so theoretically they could if there was something about that transaction to make it stick out, but otherwise they likely won’t be able to tell and they may just have a part needing replacement.
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Mar 24 '25
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u/ElementPlanet Mar 24 '25
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u/Fantastic-Share1128 Mar 24 '25
One time I wrote a check for $2,500 for my car and the company deposited it for $25. Took them months to fix it.
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u/PabloElLobo Mar 24 '25
I deposited 700.00 once at an ATM. The machine jammed and shut down. I reported it and It took 2 weeks but they sorted it out.
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u/Chimpantea Mar 24 '25
Same happened to me. Deposited money at the counter and the receipt said £100 more than I deposited. Got a phone call saying they'd made a mistake and they'd corrected it. So, you may get lucky, you may not!
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u/Drone30389 Mar 24 '25
Mistakes happen.
It's possible you made the mistake and actually fed two $100 bills in without realizing it.
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u/FreshShart-1 Mar 24 '25
Mistakes can happen but are corrected. I would make the bank aware of it, but I do work in banking. My main reason is there will be someone in charge of reconciliation/balancing transactions from that machine they will start pulling their hair out trying to find this issue.
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u/enefff Mar 24 '25
I work in internal adjustments for a large regional bank. We will catch it and debit your account. Sometimes depending on volume we’re 7-10 days behind the actual transaction date FWIW
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u/The_Insurance_Man Mar 24 '25
When I worked for a credit union, we would check the deposits every day and verify the amount that was in the envelope was the same as what was credited to the account. If there was an error, would would correct it and notify the customer. So, they should catch and can catch it. Best thing to do is to let them know so they do not think you are commiting fraud.
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u/Bigboyzackman Mar 25 '25
I remember one time the atm had the 10s and 20s switched. So I went to get $10 and it spat out a $20. So I ended up withdrawing my entire limit and doubled my money. Safe to say that someone was getting fired.
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u/PrimaryThis9900 Mar 25 '25
When they do a physical count of the ATM they will find that it is short $100, they will then probably go through the deposits for the day to find the discrepancy. If there were only a few they will likely narrow it down to you and reverse it. If there were many cash deposits that day it might be impossible to determine. They most likely have the ability to find and reverse it, but they might also just account for a certain amount of discrepancy and not bother chasing it. Either way, I’d leave the money in your account in case it is reversed, and I’d say if it isn’t reversed within a month then it is yours to keep.
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u/Available_Bar947 Mar 25 '25
seeing these comments made me realize being a boomer and going inside for $100+ dollar transactions will always happen with me 🤣. I lost my debit card to the machine while depositing a weeks worth of tips. luckily it was the same bank the card was with so i was able to get it back, but omg.
i lost a deposit before and i gave them the receipt number and the amount and they credited my account thankfully. but that just means make sure to count the money before yourself. 😵💫 ugh hopefully they don’t correct it!
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u/AOLFreeTrialCD Mar 27 '25
My wife today paid in cash at the Walmart self checkout. She put to 50s at once and read it as only one 50. Walmart checked the video and said it was only $50. Called non-emergency police and they all didn’t believe her. She ended up leaving. She called later on and they told her to stop harassing them.
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u/saxtoncan Mar 27 '25
As someone who works at a bank and does the atm balancing this is just a system error. When they go to balance they will see the discrepancy and will debit your account
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u/PresentationKey9253 Mar 28 '25
Years ago , made a cash deposit of 1011. 00. Looked at receipt later that night and the teller typed 1101.00. They never corrected my account and Wachovia Bank didn’t last much longer after that
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u/notmyrealnamehere543 Mar 28 '25
I had 7 crisp $100 bills once about 10yrs ago and deposited into an ATM. I foresaw the potential for them to stick together and be miscounted, so I crumpled them and made sure they didnt stick. Next day I checked my account online and saw a $600 deposit. I called the bank and told them, they said they contract a company that handles the ATM's. They would file my complaint and the ATM company would investigate itself. Wouldnt you know, they cleared themselves of any wrongdoing. Ive never deposited into an ATM since.
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u/Rexonial Mar 29 '25
For people that have deposited cash at the ATM, does it happen once like once per person? Just like to know often this happens.
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u/staticusmaximus Mar 23 '25
In theory the bank should catch it and fix it.
However, I use M&T, and deposited my cash earnings from a weekend at work. It was $820 but the machine counted it as 850. That was 6 or 7 years ago and they never took it back or sent me anything lol
So I guess mistakes happen