Great Western Coffee Shop

From my mailbox - new one on me.

"Also, machine at Melksham station is suddenly not taking debit cards- it worked fine a week or so ago? Is it a blip or are debit cards no longer accepted on all machines? "

Faulty card reader?

The TVM at Hanborough isd notorious for selectively refusing to accepts debit or credit cards. I have had a card of mine rejected but the next user's card accepted perfectly Ok. However on a later occasion my card that had previously been rejected was accepted perfectly normally. The screen on the Hanborough TVM is also very choosey. It has refused to accept my finger touches but then accepted the next user Ok and then on a different occasion accepted my finger touch.

A TVM will also stop accepting cards if it loses its data link.  For machines which also accept cash that isn't an immediate problem, but for the increasing number which only take cards it is a show stopper.  It also means pre-booked tickets cannot be collected.

Are TVMs able to drop back to "offline" authorisation when a data link is lost?  I know some types of debit card do not permit this, but it would enable the majority of transactions to still go through.

My post was based on a conversation I had with an engineer trying to fix a TVM I wanted to use.  Part of the problem with losing the data link is the machine cannot download the latest list of "hot" cards - ie ones reported lost or stolen.

My bank impose an offline limit. I queried this why sometimes it works offline and sometimes it doesn't. They refused to disclose the offline limit though.
What I did establish though is its somewhere between ^29.90 and ^59.80 as it worked when we tried it again as a separate transactions for me and Mrs W but declined when we tried as one transaction.

I can confirm there's a bug on the machine at Melksham

(http://www.terrascope.co.uk/images/bug.jpg)

And a lot of PINs seem to include 0...

In addition to the offline limit there is a counter on some debit card chips which determine how many times the card can be used offline before it is used again on-line. This threw me because once I tried to buy a ticket on a train (TVM out of action,Ticket office not open) and the Avantix declined the transaction even though (a) I don't believe they have an "on-line" mode and (b) there were sufficient funds in the account. It was because I had used the cards for small purchases previously at a supermarket which didn't do on-line authorisation because it was below their floor limit. In this case the "offline counter" in the chip is decremented. Whilst it stays above 0 you can use your card in offline mode. There is also a thread on the coffeeshop which talks about this (although has a slightly different theory). It gets into detail about reply #12 - From Btline...

http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=9433.0 (http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=9433.0)

Regards

Dave

 

This could explain why a pub I go to with patchy mobile reception (well whatever network the SIM in their card machine uses is patchy) has problems with some customers and not others. Generally the amounts being processed are under ^30 so contactless is used, but some cards (e.g. Barclaycard, Lloyds) will go through even with no signal, but others' (e.g. Santander, NatWest) don't. I would guess the offline limit for those that work is at least ^20, but for those that don't at most ^10. Obviously this is just anecdotal, I guess banks provision the cards depending on the customer profile.

Edit: I liked your post, because in future, a solution for those having trouble might be to suggest trying 2 x < ^10