Legal Environment 4th Edition by Jeffrey Beatty, Susan Samuelson

Exercise 7

Janet Hooper Ritchie knew that the shoe store at Buckland Hills mall in Manchester, Connecticut, would not accept a Discover credit card, so she stopped at an ATM for a $100 cash advance. Ritchie, a Congregational minister, inserted her card only to have it returned with a slip that said her withdrawal had been rejected. Ritchie thought that it was odd the slip did not bear the name of a bank. A few days later, she learned she was one of more than 100 customers bilked of confidential code information through the phony ATM. The crooks made off with a total of $100,000 after using the code information obtained by the ATM to make counterfeit bank cards. They used these fake cards to hit ATMs up and down the East Coast and pillage customer accounts. Who is liable for these losses-the banks or the customers whose accounts were looted?