What happens to cards swallowed by the ATM?

We all know the result of consecutively inserting the wrong pin, or what happens when we try to use a card that has already expired... But do you know what happens to your card after it is swallowed by the automatic machine? Find out about the mysterious journey of swallowed bank cards.

Every day hundreds of bank cards are retained at ATMs. The card retention system was created to guarantee customer security and prevent fraud and requires cards to follow a highly secure route to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands and compromising access to your money.

But let's find out what journey the cards make from your retention to their destruction.

1. The card is blacklisted

To ensure that your card details are not used after they have been retained and that your account is secure, your card details are placed on a "blacklist". This list protects bank customers from misuse of their card details (e.g. for online purchases).

2. Collecting the captured cards

Cards from different banks can be retained in each ATM. The bank that owns the ATM regularly collects these cards and separates them by entity.

Every week, the various banks schedule the exchange of retained cards so that the cards are returned to the banks to which they belong.

This process, although seemingly simple, is quite complex. We're talking about thousands of cards a week, and from many different banks.

The process of separating the cards by banking entity alone is a headache for the banks because of the security and rigor required and the logistics of the whole process.

This whole cycle means that it often takes well over a week for a withheld card to reach the issuing bank.

3. Checking the cards collected

After receiving the cards, each bank checks their cards, one by one, to ensure that everything is correct. In this process, the cards collected are compared with the list provided by the other banks that have collected the cards from their ATMs.

4. Destruction of cards

Finally, cards that are not returned to customers are destroyed! The cards are usually shredded by industrial machines and the waste is handed over to an entity that will process it.

Card capture on the ATM network results in a significant administrative and operational burden for banks, as well as costs. Banks often have too many resources dedicated to this process and it doesn't flow smoothly, resulting in delays in identifying captured cards and prolonging the time they are blacklisted.

This is why Contisystems developed the captured card processing service, which centralizes the collection of cards, their reading and reporting, streamlining the logistics of exchanging them with other banks, storing them in vaults and destroying them in an ecologically responsible manner when their end of life is confirmed. We believe that, with this service, we speed up the process of handing over cards to the respective issuer and reduce the operational effort involved. Find out more about our service here: https://conti.systems/pt/solucoes-de-pagamento/recolha-e-reciclagem-de-cartoes/