A Minneapolis-based atm company has made it a long-standing practice to lie to customers and sales prospects by collecting a mythical "Visa and Mastercard" fee for every atm transaction on its network.
Normally, the owner of an atm gets to keep whatever their transaction fee is. So if a business owns an atm that has a transaction fee of $1.50, they get to keep $1.50 every time the atm is used.
But ATM Network cites an 11 cent fee that Visa and Mastercard charge because they actually own all of the processing networks. They claim that this fee goes directly to Visa and Mastercard, and ATM Network doesn't get any of it.
However, if you talk with any atm owner that does not have an atm that processes through ATM Network, they have never heard such a thing. What's more is that they don't even tell you about this fee unless you should happen to stumble upon it by going through your statement. Their salespeople will lie through their teeth when you ask them if there are any fees: "we don't charge you any fees like most other atm companies do."
11 cents doesn't sound like much. It actually used to be 6.5 cents. But I guess the economy was hard on their President, Phil Rock, and about one year ago they raised the fee to the current rate. ATM Network has over 5,000 machines on their network, so if you do the math on a conservative average of 200 transactions for each machine, you come up with about $1.3 million.
Add to that the fact that the company condones other under-handed practices, like adding monthly connection fees (that customers are not aware of unless they stumble onto it) the picture is clear: DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH ATM NETWORK.
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