Belgian banks have gone to the Orwellian extremes of outright refusing cash deposits without proof of source, even for small amounts as low as €50! The war on cash (war on privacy) is in full swing in Belgium.

At the same time, German ATMs are not producing receipts. My understanding of EU law is that the ATM must print a receipt if there is a currency exchange on the ATM’s side of the transaction (please correct me if I’m wrong). But I see no EU law requiring ATMs to print receipts generally. Some ATMs in Germany don’t even have printers; no slot for dispensing receipts. By extension, I suppose such ATMs must not be capable of offering dynamic currency conversion (which is bizarre because that’s where the most profit is in the ATM business).

In any case, it seems a bit off that you can get cash from a German ATM, get denied a receipt (you don’t know in advance that a receipt will not be given), and then you cannot deposit that cash in Belgium due to their nannying.

Or can you? What if you write down the ATM machine’s number, location, time, date, and amount. Would a log of that information serve to document the source of the cash to legal standards?

  • Electricd@lemmybefree.net
    1·
    8 months ago

    When withdrawing money, it should appear in your bank account as a withdrawal. If you withdrew 2k a few years ago or something, I guess you could say you never used them and deposited them back or something

    They might track the serial numbers on the bills though

    • ciferecaNinjo@fedia.ioOP
      1·
      8 months ago

      When withdrawing money, it should appear in your bank account as a withdrawal.

      Indeed it does, showing only the currency of the account the money drew from, not the amount dispensed by the ATM in the currency of the ATM. There’s also a data minimisation problem: using a bank statement from another bank to prove a cash withdrawal reveals a lot of detail about that other bank account to the bank taking the deposit along with all transactions on that statement.

      It’s a fuckup by the EU. When different countries have different rules and restrictions on the Euro, the interplay downgrades the value of the euro. What good is a euro from country A if country B disallows deposits by their internal rules as a consequence of country A not producing receipts?