System error hits CommBank ATMs

By Liz Tay on Mar 2, 2011 6:49 AM
Filed under Software

Updated: Two charged after glitch enabled customers to overdraw accounts.

Database issues at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia spread to more than 40 NSW ATMs late yesterday, allowing customers to withdraw “large amounts” of cash they may not have had in their accounts.

The ATM glitch was highlighted by the NSW Police, who warned that ATM locations were “covered extensively by surveillance”.

Two men were charged late yesterday after a police patrol allegedly saw a group of men "standing outside a banking institution" in western Sydney.

"The group were allegedly seen to exchange amounts of money between themselves before separating," Police said in a brief statement.

NSW Police alleged the two men were "found to be in possession of an amount of cash" when stopped nearby.

"It will be alleged that both men dishonestly obtained the cash by using a faulty ATM," Police said.

The Daily Telegraph reported the charges related to the CBA's ATM problems.

CBA systems

According to a Commonwealth Bank customer service representative, the bank’s IT systems were not properly registering ATM transactions.

Users were thus issued with receipts that erroneously indicated that no money had been withdrawn, and also allowed users to overdraw their accounts.

Citing information provided to the bank’s call centre staff, the bank employee said the glitch was related to a payment system outage at the bank.

Customers had been unable to transfer funds by NetBank, phone banking and BPay since 9am Tuesday, due to “routine database maintenance” that occurred overnight.

The bank employee said that it would not be “giving out free money”.

Commonwealth Bank had records of all withdrawals, which would be applied – along with any applicable fees – to customers’ bank accounts when the system was restored, she said.

Police said it was a criminal offence to keep excess money, which should be returned to the bank, according to Detective Superintendent Col Dyson of the State Crime Command’s Fraud Squad.

A spokesman for the bank could not be reached for more detail.

Twitter was abuzz with news of the glitch, with users reporting large crowds at the bank's central Sydney ATMs.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported the glitch was fixed by 5.30pm yesterday.

4 comments in this discussion

"My Money is with deepthroat and not in the CBA! Database vulnerability exploited!"

By BaysNet

Tags

cba, outage, commbank, atm, police, fraud, atmglitch, financeit

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Comments: 4

deepthroat Mar 2, 2011 8:58 AM	A glitch? More likely a hack. Given the vast amount of effort and money spent by the banks on these systems it is some leap of faith to accept this was a mistake. Odds on the NAB's recent problems were no accident - of course the banks would rather take the hit than admit they have been compromised.
Ezy2Confuze Mar 2, 2011 9:46 AM	I'm beggining to wonder whether Stuxnet really was just a once off attack on Iran or whether something similar is out there, we've had a few major banks with issues lately, we've had a few major Stock Exchanges having glitches too. Frankly if this is just a "glitch" with their Oracle solution, after the nab's glitch - it's not a secret that they have a massive Oracle install going on - you'd have to seriously start looking at what value for money you get from Oracle these days. Having just been quoted roughly $30K per core for Oracle licensing, if I was a CIO putting Oracle in, I'd be wanting Larry Ellison himself calling me to assure me we wouldn't have any problems, ever.
Notomys Mar 2, 2011 10:00 AM	Oracle is a marketing company, not a technology company. The problem is not Oracle, SQL Server or Sybase, it's that these organisations want a 24x7x365 database, but get tricked by marketing and consultants that maintenance and upgrade outages are acceptable. There is a real difference between high availability and business continuity. A clustering solution is not business continuity cause you need to take it down for upgrades, patches, etc. There are ways of making a database system unbreakable/foolproof but very few DBA's are taught or exposed to such systems.
BaysNet Mar 2, 2011 10:46 AM	My Money is with deepthroat and not in the CBA! Database vulnerability exploited!