Money

cross-posted from: https://belgae.social/post/1185423

EU Directive 2019/1 defines cartel this way:

“(11) ‘cartel’ means an agreement or concerted practice between two or more competitors aimed at coordinating their competitive behaviour on the market or influencing the relevant parameters of competition through practices such as, but not limited to, the fixing or coordination of purchase or selling prices or other trading conditions, including in relation to intellectual property rights, the allocation of production or sales quotas, the sharing of markets and customers, including bid-rigging, restrictions of imports or exports or anti-competitive actions against other competitors;”

“(12) ‘secret cartel’ means a cartel, the existence of which is partially or wholly concealed;”

A cartel is quite harmful to consumers as I understand it, and as that definition suggests. But I find no prohibition on cartels in EU Directive 2019/1. There is a huge amount of text about giving leniency to secret carels. Leniency implies there is a prohibition to begin with. The anti-competition prohibition seems to be wholly in the TFEU arts.101—102, though nothing about cartels specifically. That’s also just strictly regulating cross-border competition. So IIUC, the EU is unconcerned with anti-competitive scenarios falling wholly within a member state, correct?

I’m ultimately trying to work out whether this trend of ATM cartels is lawful. It seems to have started in NL but the shitshow is spreading out from there. I get the impression the ATM cartels would not be considered cross-border anti-competition, thus not an EU concern. From there, it’s down to just national anti-competition law, correct?

Why I give a shit

I visited a city where 100% of the ATMs were owned by a single ATM cartel. The machines rejected my perfectly valid card and it gave a bullshit reason. The machine gave a vague lie. The card works in other ATMs, just not that of the cartel that dominated that whole city. I was legitimately afraid to try more than two ATMs because failed withdrawal attempts themselves become a red flag for banks’ shitty AI fraud algos. Three failed attempts and the ATM might confiscate the card, or my bank might cut it off from all transactions. So it’s sensible to make every attempt at a different kind of machine to not waste the precious few attempts that are tolerated by the skiddish algos coded by those without accountability for DoS errors.

Do we have to eat this shit? Do I have to accept that I can never get cash from an ATM in that city now that the ATMs are all pawned? Or is there recourse?

Incompetent engineering is just one example of why I give a shit. Another example is that I do not want one single giant entity to track my banking and totally control my access to money. Facebook users are happy to be centrally surveilled but I am not.

If their shitty AI fraud algos falsely trigger, I obviously would like a 2nd opinion from a different ATM owner. Competition law should ensure that, I would think, but I’m not finding it.

Apparently it’s possible to pay cash to a Google Pay retailer and top-up the account without having a bank account. But it’s not a global option.

Anyone know if this is possible in Belgium or Germany? Looks like Carrefour and MediaMarkt accept Gpay. A Carrefour cashier only knew that it’s possible to pay using Google Pay, not top-up the balance. He pointed to a Google Play gift card (note the L). Can Google Play credit be transferred to Google Pay?

(edit) No, it is not possible to do Google Play → Google Pay. There are some silly ugly hacks but nothing reasonable.

Question still remains as to whether there is any way in BE or DE to put cash on a gpay account.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/29617623

The linked fedi comment is a bit alarming. In a GDPR region, a prospective mortgage borrower was denied a home loan because the bank knew how much he spent on wine.

The post gets errors (as if it were censored?), but I can reach it only within a slrpnk.net cache of the comment. I will quote it here in case others also cannot reach the comment:

Anonymity is very important.

Here's a example why, that recently happened to a workmate:

He applied for a mortgage to buy a house. The application was denied 3 times, despite his having been employed at the same place for 20 years, paid all his bills on time and never received so much as a parking ticket. Finally, after insisting heavily and threatening to sue, his bank provided the reason why: his purchasing habits included too much alcohol.

Or said another way: the bank watched what he purchased when doing his groceries for years and quietly classified him as a wino and potential deadbeat.

I can tell you, when I do my groceries, and back when I still smoked, I never paid for alcohol or tobacco with anything other than cash, for that very reason. The only things I pay for with plastic paint the portrait of a boring working stiff with no habits out of the ordinary. For the rest, it's cash-only.

And if you want another example of why anonymity is important: a few years ago, I sought the help of an underground surgeon to perform a certain type of surgery on me that my stupid doctors here refused to perform, despite my quality of life going to shit (it's a long story...)

Guess what: underground surgeons don't take credit cards. The man changed my life for the better but I certainly don't want my local health insurance to know about it. Was it illegal? Hell yes. Was it justified? Hell yes. Legal and right are two different things.

And similarly, I expected many women post Roe v. Wade would like to have the opportunity to get an abortion out of state anonymously without going to jail.

That's why anonymous payments are essential: they are the last rampart between you and unjust laws and prejudice.

This story should really get some serious press. I tried searching the enshitified web for stories similar to this and got no hits. WTF.

How are banks getting such detail as to know what people are buying?

My expectation: the bank should only know the total amount of the grocery store transaction, not an itemised list of what someone buys. WTF is going on here? It’s a data minimisation failure on the part of the grocery store and also on the part of the bank who over-collected data. And most importantly, the payment processor. What possible grounds does the payment processor have to put that data in the protocol and pass it along?

And a transparency failure. On what scale is this happening in the EU?

I hope, at least, that the 3 denials were from the applicants own bank.

(crossposted from !cash)

From the EU payment services directive 3 proposal:

● Provisions concerning cash withdrawals
Operators of retail stores are exempted from the requirement for a payment institution license when they offer cash withdrawal services without a purchase on their premises (on a voluntary basis), if the amount of cash distributed does not exceed EUR 50, in line with the need to avoid unfair competition with ATM deployers.

^ That proposal is from 2023. Anyone know if it has been implemented?

Searching eur-lex.europa.eu is a disaster. I could not find any docs on any successors to this proposal, or whether it was implemented.

Blocking shops from offering a decent amount of cashback is shitty. But it’s also shitty how one ATM cartel is killing off competing independent ATMs in each country. It would make more sense to allow shops to offer large cashback amounts (they usually only have small amounts anyway), but then limit the number of ATMs per bank in each region so more independent operators can compete.

(cross-posted from !cash)

Albert Hein has removed their ATMs in Amsterdam. I don’t think the machines were part of the Geldmaat cartel, so this move reduces ATM diversity and empowers the Geldmaat’s monopolizing stranglehold… makes the data collection more centralised. You are extra fucked when Geldmaat rejects your card because in some cities you have no other kind of ATM to try.

Some Spar locations previously had a quite generous cashback service. You could pay by card and get back as much as €150. It’s unclear if it’s just one Spar location that has cut this option off or if all of them. The generous cashback policy got me through the door. I would buy snacks and drinks I don’t really need just for the cashback service. It was a refuge from the ATM shit-show. If the whole Spar chain quit cashback, it would be cool if thousands of people would approach the register with a basket of food, ask for cashback, and abandon the food when refused. I wonder how many people would need to do that to create the perception that they are losing sales over the change.