Losing a credit card due to automatic user behavior

As far as I can tell France universally uses &quot;Flow A&quot; (get your card back first, then your cash). When I started using ATMs, in the late 80s, I remember that &quot;Flow A&quot; and &quot;Flow B&quot; were about equally common, then in a relatively short span of time all the banks switched to A.<p>It surprises me, reading about it now, that it could be different in any other part of the world. That Flow A is the correct solution is not obvious, but it should be obvious to anyone who&#x27;s studied human behavior and human error, which should be anyone involved in the design of ATMs. The form of &quot;goal fixation&quot; Jenny mentions is a very common pattern in human errors.

Bank of America switched years ago to &quot;Insert card, remove card, enter PIN, take money, take receipt.&quot; Capturing invalid cards, while often done with early ATMs, turns out not to be all that useful as a fraud prevention measure. It&#x27;s not required by the current PCI standard for ATMs.[1]<p>There&#x27;s also an attack on ATMs called the &quot;Lebanese Loop&quot;[2] which requires that the ATM try to retain a card. So there&#x27;s a security problem with retaining cards.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcisecuritystandards.org&#x2F;pdfs&#x2F;PCI_ATM_Security_Guidelines_Info_Supplement.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcisecuritystandards.org&#x2F;pdfs&#x2F;PCI_ATM_Security_G...</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lebanese_loop" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lebanese_loop</a>

The author is mistaken about people always waiting for their money from an ATM. I&#x27;ve seen people take their card and leave the machine before the money comes out. I&#x27;m pretty sure I&#x27;ve done it myself at least once, when I was thinking about something else.

In terms of ATM struggles for foreign visitors, Brazil really holds the record. The workflow requires you to insert your card twice (at least for Banco do Brasil). It goes like this:<p>Insert card -&gt; Take card (no PIN entered yet) -&gt; Choose account &amp; amount -&gt; Enter PIN -&gt; Insert card <i>again</i> -&gt; Take card -&gt; Take cash<p>Also, most banks in Brazil have ATMs that DON&#x27;T give cash right beside ATMs that DO give cash. The ones that don&#x27;t give cash are meant for deposits, balances, payments, and transfers, but the GUI is otherwise identical, i.e., they display a cash withdrawal button even though they aren&#x27;t equipped for cash! &quot;If you then proceed with a cash withdrawal, the machine will hold onto your card for several minutes while making dispensing noises and finally return your card without giving any cash or receipt.&quot;[1]<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;brazilsense.com&#x2F;index.php?title=Bank_cards_and_ATMs#Look_for_the_word_Saques" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;brazilsense.com&#x2F;index.php?title=Bank_cards_and_ATMs#L...</a>

Unfortunately I can&#x27;t provide a reference, but I distinctly remember reading that the user flow at German ATMs is specifically designed to minimize forgotten card incidents.

Some ATMs in Canada do make you take your card first before dispensing the money if it&#x27;s not your last transaction. Others display a &quot;Remember to take your card&quot; message. Others have a beep and flashing light near the card slot.<p>There really is no standard.

Interesting, in the Netherlands almost all ATMs work in the same way as Germany, take the card first before it gives you the money.<p>However the other part about paying a lot in cash seems strange to me? And a fee on card payments while cash withdrawal is free if the exact opposite of my Dutch card. Paying in shops is free, cash withdrawal within the country is also free (not sure if all banks do this), but taking cash from an ATM abroad costs a small transaction fee.

One solution to the problem of user flow A vs user flow B is to dispense the cash and return the card <i>simultaneously</i> and <i>together</i>. The &quot;together&quot; part is admittedly difficult to engineer but perhaps the card slot could be placed just above the cash dispenser, so both are in your line of sight.

I went to Japan a couple of years ago and one of the ATMs we used had an internal conveyor system of some kind, which resulted in it ejecting the card with the cash and receipt simultaneously from the same slot. I&#x27;ve always wondered why those weren&#x27;t more standard, it seemed much more efficient.

I lost my (German) credit card exactly the same way in Bangkok. Unlike the author, I never received my card back and had to order a replacement card, which takes ages to ship to the other side of the world. Never travel without a second credit card.

Hey, could you share some information on how do you make those awesome graphics? :)

<p><pre><code> Website is offline No cached version of this page is available. Error 522 Connection timed out </code></pre> I&#x27;m commenting because I want to come back and find this later, but I don&#x27;t want to upvote without reading, and I don&#x27;t have a unified bookmark list, so bookmarking won&#x27;t help if I subsequently use a different machine.<p><i>Edit: Now read it - thanks for the cache reference</i>

I had to take the server down for a minute to install a caching plugin... check back soon!