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

Yes,you could do this.

It depended. The more sophisticated shops did a live check to make sure that you had available funds and so would decline if you didn’t- proper supermarkets did this. Corner shops and petrol stations processed debit cards in the same way as cheques and therefore allowed you to do it. I was an extremely impoverished student in the late 90s and knew exactly which shops you could get away with it in.

Yep used to do this. And when paying by cheque run a magnet over as rumour had it that meant they had to process it manually and it would take longer. Seemed to work!

Yeah you could - the bank wouldn't be able to instantly reject it, it would take 24 hours so you could buy stuff for an extra day after the money ran out. You'd get charged for non-agreed overdraft obviously.

I can't even remember if I knew this as if I used it I was probably drunk at the time!

I remember when DM would write cheques in the supermarket, it always meant we had no money for a day or two.

I used to do this all the time. I didn’t know you still could. it’s not really the same now that the money comes straight out of the bank.

there used to be a pub locally where they would let you cash a cheque and put the date you wanted them to pay it into the bank. I’m not sure if it worked, but everyone used to fold through the numbers at the bottom so it would have to be processed manually and took longer.

Them were the days.

An elderly relative got his card and pin stolen at a cash machine by distraction feckers

the thieves went to a number of shops and did lots of small cash back in many shops before the card was stopped. The shops were known to police but no cctv and no evidence.