Hi,
I am come often to Taiwan and right now I am in Tainan, but I do not live here (I have relatives, but no account where I can send money: they are too old and they cannot reach their bank easily to withdraw).
Every time I have problems withdrawing from ATMs with my Italian cards.
The only 2 things that I am sure of are:
my cards work in Cathay United Bank, but not those in Family Mart, just those in the bank (which is far from my place)
the Cirrus logo must be there, but many ATMs showing the logo do not work.
I read in other threads that many people had luck in 7-11 ATMs, but I did not, and they do not have the cirrus logo.
Do you know how can I search for an alternative cirrus ATM? That one from Cathay United is too far!
Thank you
Sinopac Bank is Cirrus, but the last time i tried to use it they wanted to add a $100nt fee for the withdrawal so ibsaid no. I guess if you are in a pinch.
E. Sun bank is also Cirrus, and no transaction fee so try them first.
There is an option on the atm that will say international card, you need to select this or it wont work.
My international cards have worked at both in the past.
[quote=“atrac”]Do you know how can I search for an alternative cirrus ATM? That one from Cathay United is too far!
Thank you[/quote]
You can find nearby ATMs with Google Maps (keyword “ATM” or “提款機”). In theory all ATMs should support all common cards regardless of the stickers. I’m not even sure if there is any actual difference between how transactions are processed for Maestro/MasterCard and Cirrus these days. From my experience, the widest range of foreign cards is accepted by Bank of Taiwan (台灣銀行) and Land Bank (土地銀行), so you might want to check those first. Otherwise, try this link: mastercard.us/en-us/consume … n-atm.html
Might also be a good idea to call your bank to tell them you’re in Taiwan and make sure they set an exception for this in their fraud prevention filter. If the rejections are intermittent this could be the reason.
Dorae, last year my experience was all ATMs took my international card.
But this year something happened and all the government banks wouldn’t give me money. First bank, changhua bank, land bank… all rejected.
Even the bank personnel had no idea. These banks had accepted my card in the past, it was strange.
Taishin still worked, esun and sinopac too.
Haven’t tried the government banks recenty, maybe its fixed now.
Interestingly, I’ve also had similar issues recently that never happened before – although I switched bank accounts in the meantime, so in my case the issuing bank could equally be the culprit.
I attribute this to increased security for ATM transactions with different chip standards that are not fully compatible between countries or regions.
Taixin ATMs would return my card immediately, without even a chance to enter the PIN, saying “IC problem, contact issuer.” Chinatrust (7-Eleven) would try to charge me $100, a fee I know they introduced a couple of years ago that for some reason never applied to any of my cards before: it could be that they changed something just recently but my guess is that it’s charged for magnetic stripe transactions only, and the reason I’m being asked for it now is also because the ATM cannot read the chip. Some other ATMs work though, as do EFTPOS transactions.
The options are either (a) finding ATMs that work and just using those or (b) contacting the issuer (your bank) and making them investigate it. If you try (c) talking to a bank branch in Taiwan where the problematic ATM is, my experience corroborates yours, that is they really have no way to tell what exactly happened and why.
Unfortunately 台灣銀行 ATM did not work.
Contacting my bank would be useless, I asked before leaving, since this is a recurrent problem, but they have no clue. They keep saying that if the ATM has cirrus logo it will work, which is not true, because 台灣銀行 has cirrus logo.
At the end, I was luck because there was, few years ago, a branch of Cathay Union Bank near my place, which was shut down, but now I have seen that they provided ATM’s that work! I will stick with that for now.
Thanks everybody for all your suggestions.