An IT data expert claims Nationwide staff effectively accused him of trying to defraud the building society following a routine £300 cash machine withdrawal that failed to produce his money.
Steve McQueen, whose previous work for Cheshire police and other organisations required him to pass GCHQ security vetting and to sign the Official Secrets Act, says the building society has refused to refund him after the failed withdrawal in Liverpool last month.
McQueen, a Nationwide customer for more than 30 years who says he has never had cause to complain about a withdrawal before, used his debit card at a Santander ATM in the city’s main shopping precinct.
He says he inputted his pin but, instead of producing his cash and receipt, the machine displayed a transaction error and nothing came out. Thinking the transaction had simply failed, he took £200 out of a Lloyds ATM just along the street. But when he later looked at his statement, both transactions had been debited from his account.
Despite a spate of attacks on ATMs by criminal gangs across the north-west in recent years, Santander has told Nationwide that a thorough check of the ATM and its records had shown up no discrepancies.
“Therefore I regret that no adjustment (refund) can be made to your account,” Nationwide told McQueen, who lives in Prescot, Merseyside.
He went back to the building society, pointing out that there must have been some mistake and suggesting that the error code must have been logged, but he was rebuffed again.
Nationwide, he says, has denied his refund on the basis that his money had left the ATM and was not held at the end of the day, as happens if a customer fails to take their cash and it is retained. “In a long phone call from Nationwide, I was effectively accused of trying to defraud it,” says McQueen. “I pointed out that I used to work in high-level IT security and for the police, but to no avail. I can’t understand why there isn’t camera footage of the incident, but no one appears willing or able to access it. I have been treated shabbily.”
The explanation could be that a criminal had attached a device to the ATM to prevent the money being dispensed. This is a problem that has afflicted Santander ATMs in the area in the past. In 2016, police warned people in Lancashire and Wilmslow, Cheshire, not to use Santander cash machines over fears they had been compromised. Officers were concerned that criminals had fitted a false front or other device to ATM machines to prevent the cash leaving them. Santander shut down five affected ATMs at the time.
In August 2017, police in Liverpool arrested a gang armed with a crude “cash trap device” that they were allegedly using to rob a cashpoint at a Merseyside petrol station.
Nationwide told Guardian Money that only Santander had the CCTV footage of the incident, which it had not passed on. “We have asked Santander to double-check that no device has subsequently been detected on the ATM. We will review the claim and update the customer once we receive the outcome of this request,” says a spokeswoman.
Santander adds: “This ATM was replaced a couple of years ago with one of our new models, which comes with security measures that make it difficult for criminals to fit a cash-trapping device. We have no record of any installation of a cash-trapping device at any of these new ATMs.” It says its CCTV cameras are not pointed directly at the ATM “to ensure customer privacy of pin numbers is maintained”.
