PEOPLE WHO made withdrawals at Allied Irish Bank ATMs but failed to take their money are set for substantial refunds starting this week after a trawl of the bank’s records revealed that anti-fraud measures it implemented had led to thousands of customers’ accounts being wrongly debited.
In a statement AIB confirmed it would refund more than €8 million to people who had used its cash machines between 2003 and 2010 but left their money behind. Some €5.1 million has been earmarked for 41,000 transactions involving AIB customers while €3.2 million has been set aside to compensate 30,000 non-AIB customers.
The automatic repayments will include interest and affected cardholders will be contacted by their banks over the coming days to inform them of the refund, which, the bank said, would average €116 per transaction.
The bank said the problem had arisen following the introduction of anti-fraud measures in the 1990s which were aimed at stopping the automatic processing of refunds if money was returned to an ATM after not being collected by a user within a 30-second time limit.
Like all Ireland’s main retail banks, AIB introduced the security measures to stop scammers who were using compromised cards to withdraw substantial sums of money but leaving the top and bottom notes in the pile offered by the ATM in place.
These two notes would then be returned to the machine which would wrongly record that no money had been withdrawn and so allow further withdrawals. In one case, €50,000 was taken using this method.