Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2009 | 4:18 p.m.
A Las Vegas company that operates ATM machines in casinos around the country said Tuesday it's working to resolve a problem in which about 40,000 customers nationwide were charged for cash withdrawals, but did not receive their cash.
Global Cash Access Holdings Inc. said the problem occurred Friday night and Saturday morning between 7:51 p.m. and 1:05 a.m. Pacific time and affected the company's entire network, which includes 1,100 locations around the country.
Scott Dowty, executive vice president of business development, said a computer gateway operated by Visa sent requests to banks for withdrawals involving certain PIN-based ATM transactions. Credit card transactions were not affected.
In the affected ATM transactions, bank computers approved the withdrawals and charged the customers' accounts, but the ATMs didn't receive signals to dispense the cash because of the problem with the Visa gateway, Dowty said. Not all ATM transactions were affected.
Global Cash said the company has been working with Visa to have the affected customers' accounts credited. Some 35 percent to 40 percent of the transactions have been reversed, and the rest of the transactions should be cleared up within three to five business days, Dowty said.
"We at GCA are fully aware of the customer service issues this outage presents. Because we have had several (system) conversion issues ourselves over the last month we are especially upset with this recent outage. We have had our team working around the clock to ensure any and all issues on our system have been corrected and to rebuild the service level trust you expect. While this was out of GCA’s control we are chagrined to have our service interrupted by this outage at Visa. You can be sure the entire organization and I are 100 percent focused on this issue with Visa," Global Cash Chief Executive Scott Betts said in a letter to customers.
Customers with unresolved problems can call Global Cash Access at 800 644-0439.
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