Tuesday, Oct 25, 2011 at 22:18
That's right Bigfish.
Many traders have manual facilities, but not all.
Then there are those that do have manual facilities but do not accept all cards.
Taxis are just one example. The ones that are on the Cabcharge Fareway System (nearly every cab in Australia that has EFTPOS) only accept Cabcharge & TSS cards manually when the system is down.
So when the entire Eastern states EFTPOS system for NAB goes down, which happens a lot more than you would imagine, you need cash to ride in a taxi.
Plenty of other traders do not have manual transaction agreements in place with their providers as
well.
There have been plenty of times when one of the banks will be down or even just a particular branch will often be down. But occasionally every bank will go down at the same time.
Then there is the threat of identity theft.
I had a lady in my taxi that was out from England & had all of her accounts back homer frozen. What had happened was that somewhere in Europe police had busted a card skimming racket & one of her cards came up as one that had been skimmed. The outcome was that all of her accounts at that bank were then frozen.
So she is here in
Cairns & goes to the ATM to get some cash & it keeps the card & does not give her any money. Many hours on the phone later she is unable to get any money because all of her accounts are with the same bank & they have no branch in Australia. Her only saving grace was that her mother lived in
Cairns & was able to draw several thousand dollars of cash out of the bank to give her so she could continue surviving until her return to England.
That is why some people choose to carry cards from 2 or more different banks when they travel OS or carry good old travellers cheques.
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