Experience with standalone ATMS

Hi All,

Just thought I’d serve this as a bit of a heads up, and to see if anyone else has had similar issues.
I was away with the family last week and, as you do with 2 kids under 10, we ended up at a theme park. Paid for both the parking and entry on my Monzo card no issue.

There was a sign saying no cash taken inside but there are ATMs so I thought there’d be no problem.
It was a pretty hot day and we needed some drinks in a short time so headed to one of the ATMs. It had the logos for both Mastercard and VISA and wasn’t a LINK machine that I could see - just a standard Grey stand alone thing you commonly see in the corner of shops.

Took my card fine but it said it couldn’t process the transaction when I selected an amount to withdraw, thought the machine might be at fault so went to another and same thing. Moved away and saw some people using Mastercard cards to get cash out no issue so got in touch with Monzo via the chat and they got back super quickly (about 4 minutes) but said as there were no declines showing on my account they couldn’t help.

By this point I had an angry wife and 2 thirty kids trapped in a hot theme park with no way of getting food or drink for the rest of the day we were supposed to be there and having paid £80 for entry I didn’t particularly like the idea of leaving.

Despite Monzo trying their best they couldn’t come up with a reason it wouldn’t be working. Thankfully my wife had a different card on her I was able to transfer money to and get us something to drink but I felt thoroughly stranded by my Monzo card on that day.

Monzo have said they’ve passed it through for the operator “DC Payments” to find out what went on - which is great.

Has anyone else had a similar experience on one of these small stand alone ATMs? any other occasions? I really don’t like to carry a lot of cards around but I feel like if I’m going to be in a closed environment like that again I’ll need to have some form of backup options.

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Always wise to carry a backup card but I agree you should be able to rely on your primary one. Hopefully Monzo get to the bottom of this with the ATM operator.

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Out of curiosity I assume the machines weren’t magstrip based and you had that off (as it is by default) ?

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You get a “declined” notification if that is the case.

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Ahh fair enough

Any chance the card pin was done wrong 3 times previously? Probably not the issue though.

Was this in the UK?

Have you tried using your Monzo card in a different ATM? - your card might have become faulty.

Yep it’s worked flawlessly since, just those machines

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