Getting 'cashback' on debit cards 90s/00s if you didn't have money in account

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Please settle argument/check I'm not going mad.
I remember late 90s/early 00s -and being very financially irresponsible- that you could get cash from a transaction on your debit card. E.g. you'd buy chewing gum for 30p and get £30 cash which you had to sign fir on the receipt. The best bit was for some reason you could get the cash even of you had no money in your account because there was a time delay on it processing.
Friends same age not only do not remember this, but a bank working friend says it would have been impossible. But I CLEARLY remember doing it

You can still do that now

My parents used to do this with cheques in the 90s, usually at the end of the month to tide them over to payday

Yup, you could absolutely do this. kept me in the pub many an evening before payday.

Yeah I remember this. I haven’t got cashback for years (probably since pre Covid) because I barely use cash now. But I definitely remember that you could get cash this way even if you didn’t have enough to cover it in the bank, because the transaction wasn’t immediate. You’d go overdrawn though, so obviously you couldn’t keep doing it.

Yes there was a guaranteed amount on your bank card (like £50). So you could write out the cheque and the merchant knew they were going to get the money.
Abuse it though and you got the card taken away!

Yes, this was an everyday thing for debit card and cheque transactions. I'm pretty sure I was asked recently in a supermarket if I wanted cashback, so I guess they can still do it.

I used this facility in supermarkets after paying for my shop in the 90s ! Haven't done it in years though so not even sure if it's still a thing ?

Yeah you could do it. I think you had two working days before it left your account so you could get it on Wed before payday and not have any overdrawn charges.

Yes you could do this with a Switch card.

Not that I would have ever been so financially laissez faire obvs.

It depended on your your bank and type of card if this would work. The bank I worked for had standard debit card and ‘all authorise’ cards. If you had the first type this would work as the bank trusted you enough that they would get the money back eventually (and the big charges for going over drawn if it went out before your money came in). If you had the second type of card, usually under 18s or people with previous bad credit then it wouldn’t allow this.

This is how I remember it, it was the ASDA next to the pub! 'Chewing gum and £30 please' knowing full well I only had a fiver in my account!

Anyone remember switch and solo cards?

Yeah this was a big thing for me to get through to payday but I did gety debit card taken off me in the end. If they could prove you knew there was no cash in the account or did it too much, they just cancelled your debit card 😬

My mum had a switch card, from NatWest

Local pub used to cash my cheque too, those were the days!

You could do it, it was all about the floor limit, below which the supermarket wouldn't check if you had money in your account when you used your card.

Was usually about £50 IIRC so getting £30/40 cashback a day or two before payday was possible as you'd have been paid before the money left the account as it took a couple of days.

Now it's all immediate so you need the money to spend it. Which makes it a problem when using automated petrol pumps when they won't let you buy petrol unless you have £100 in your account even if you only want £10/20 worth.

Definitely worked on a switch card back in the day. Not that I ever did it, oh no...😁

Channel 4’s “yoof TV” Network 7 in the 80s had a segment showing the risk of cashpoint card cloning.

The magnetic strip kept a temporary daily track of withdrawals, the main banking system ran ‘batch processing’ overnight rather than ‘transactional processing’ on every transaction.
The cashpoint would then update the small
amount of data on the strip.

In the segment they duplicated a cashpoint card from one of the researchers, and withdrew their daily maximum limit repeatedly with different copies of the card.
Those multiple transactions would subsequently get processed overnight and the overall total deducted.

I used to do it with cheques.

I never tried that but would often do a food shop and write a cheque up to 4 days before payday! Got a better handle on my money now thankfully!

Yup! I relied on it for my food shop as a student fairly regularly. It was up to £50 and you’d get an overdraft fine for it.

Yep. Used to go to the same petrol station every Friday night. Buy petrol to drive to London. Water. Ciggies and ahem chewing gum and cash.
Card would be put into one of those funny carbon copy machines and I'd sign the receipt knowing full well I had zero money in the bank. 😬

Was definitely a thing, I relied on it! Does anyone remember when you use to get a £10 cash 'reward' when you handed in a bank card that you 'found' (got off your also skint mate) to a bank? £5 each towards a night out 🤦

That’s a form of fraud: www.investopedia.com/terms/k/kited.asp

Yes we did and wrote cheques a couple of days before pay day. In fact I remember my supervisor saying she would cash a cheque at a kiosk in morrisons to spend on a night out!
I don't think I have seen them before or since.