As the largest bank in Mexico based on market share and assets, Spanish-owned BBVA (known as Bancomer before the acquisition) attracts many expat customers. Despite its size and reach, there are numerous pitfalls to avoid if you do your banking there.
As the brilliant Notorious B.I.G. once famously said… Mo money, mo problems? Sometimes, yes.
In this post and one coming later this week, I’ll share a few of the BBVA banking problems LiveWellMexico readers have been sharing with me lately, along with advice on how to avoid these unfortunate situations yourself.
Protect Yourself When Visiting a BBVA ATM
Recently, I started seeing reports on social media of a new scam BBVA customers were falling prey to at branch ATMs. Then, while having lunch with my friend Sara (not her real name) last week, she divulged that she’d been a victim herself.
First off, Sara is a permanent resident and native Spanish speaker who’s lived in Mexico for 20+ years. On a recent Monday morning, she was visiting her usual BBVA branch in Zapopan to make a cardless cash withdrawal (which BBVA encourages customers to do by charging fees on frequent ATM withdrawals with a physical card).
Sara’s normal practice was to take a screenshot of the 16-digit one-time code the BBVA app generates for cashless withdrawals to easily reference it at the ATM. While she was checking her mobile to retrieve the code, a well-dressed man wearing glasses approached her and started to explain how the machine she was using had problems.
As an aside, if you’ve been living and banking in Mexico for a while, encountering malfunctioning ATMs is so common that you don’t think twice when another user warns you like this.
Sara took his advice and moved to another ATM he said was working fine. Before leaving the first ATM, she was careful to cancel her transaction.
When Sara entered her one-time code to withdraw cash at the second ATM, the machine declined her withdrawal, stating the code had already been used. Fearing the worst, she checked her account balance via the app, and sure enough – it had just been debited.
By now, the man who warned her about the “faulty” ATM had disappeared.
Thinking back, my friend said the man also had a phone in his hand when he approached her. She believes he used it to snap a quick photo of her phone screen and send it to an accomplice, who immediately used it to make a withdrawal.
Because the scammer never broke eye contact with Sara, she honestly wasn’t certain how the guy had stolen her code.
The Bank’s Staff Were of No Help Either
Banks were closed this particular Monday for Benito Juarez’s birthday, so Sara wasn’t able to report the theft to the BBVA branch until the next day. When she returned to explain the incident, bank staff declined to restore her lost funds, stating she was at fault for “sharing” the one-time code with a stranger.
BBVA’s response isn’t surprising and is something you should remember if you choose to bank there. They will probably not help you if you fall victim to a scam.
And before you tell me about how Mexican banking law protects customers with deposit insurance (which I wrote about here), you should count on BBVA finding a way to deny you protection unless you can somehow prove it was an inside job.
So, what can you do?
Because life in Mexico requires cold hard cash to a much larger extent than in the U.S., Canada, or Europe, withdrawing money at ATMs is something locals and expats still have to do from time to time.
Below are several ways to minimize your risk when using an ATM in Mexico:
- Do NOT accept help from anyone
- Visit during daytime hours when the bank is open and likely to be busy
- Take care to avoid exposing your mobile screen to others
- Use your debit card up to the maximum number of free withdrawals each month
- Get clever about how you save the one-time code for cardless withdrawals
My friend is now determined to memorize the one-time code so that she can withdraw money without using her mobile at the bank — or write it on her hand. Nothing wrong with these ideas.
My preference would be to write the first 14 of 16 digits on a piece of paper and memorize the last two. Or write them all down, only backwards. This reduces the risk of making an error (or getting ink all over yourself!).
Whatever you try, please be careful out there.