Need cash - Urgent
 

Literally the title says it all here. I found myself landing at PEK with 4 credit cards and no debit card coupled with $7 USD. I begged a fellow US traveler for $100USD which I immediately vemo'd him. I cannot do cash advances from my US credit cards as I never set up a pin

I'm in Beijing and I see that there is a JP Morgan Chase Bank here. Does anyone know if they are open on Saturday and is it a full service branch? If it is I can walk in with my Chase credit cards and id to do a cash advance without a pin.

My last resort will be to send myself a MoneyGram via credit card and pick it up at the Bank of China.

Any other suggestions from anyone?

This was such a rookie move for me to not double check that I had everything that I need.

I use MoneyGram sometimes when I want to send people USD quickly, and it works quite well with reasonable fees.

I give the JP Morgan approach low enough odds that I wouldn't bother.

Four cards and not one lets you set up a PIN online?

If he has his own device and the bank's website is properly secured, safety should be within normal parameters. I think most Westerners in China from time to time do online banking, both with Chinese and foreign banks. Don't recall hearing of any problems particular to China. And Chinese massively use the internet for payments.

​​​​​​no and I am beyond pissed about it.

Chase Sapphire Reserve
Capital One Spark Business Card (Had cash advance set to 0)
Chase United Club Card
Chase Business Ink Cash Card.

I am VPN'd back to my office there's no issue here. Technology is actually my field of expertise. Thanks for the concern.

JW Marriott. I'm going to talk to them in the morning. They weren't getting it when I got in and was mentally spent.

ran into this problem in AMS last year, was only there for ~8 hours and didn't bring Euros. Thought that restaurants & cafes would take CC, but they all pointed to ATM machines that required a pin. Finally got lucky at the Centraal train station, where they gave me cash advance on my Visa with my passport as ID. Huge fee. Set up pins first thing when I got home.

Just pmd you.

I have literally been to 5 Banks. The one who had the form. Postal Bank says I need to have their card to be able to pick the money up. HUH?!?!?!?! Good thing I'm waiting to see who can receive it before I send it out.

I could get by pretty well in Beijing on credit cards alone these days if I altered my food/drink habits a bit. Now that the lower end places have been pushed out of SLT, most of the remaining establishments accept foreign plastic, and of you can link foreign cards to Didi.

can confirm, have done this before (coincidentally also at a JW Marriott), so give this a try.

I must admit that I'd be a little nervous having no fallback methods at all, but this concern could be reduced/eliminated by paying up front, at least for initial orders. Some POS machines that should work with foreign cards don't because the machines themselves aren't configured properly and/or staff don't know how to fully use them.

"In China, a bank account may be required by the bank for receiving money in cash. Please consult the local bank location for more details. Overseas sender can send cash without a bank account."

https://www.westernunion.com/cn/en/receive-money.html

They gave me a big fat NO!

This was Moneygram but I guess the same policy applies. Apparently the bank of China can do it buy they are closed on the weekends.

I'm in Beijing, and am happy to help...but we are way out in Haidian...PM me if this is still an issue..

tb

All Voldoo came to my rescue. Thankful for this community and the fact that he took time out of his day to help me out. Thanks to all.

Glad it worked out, notwithstanding swallowed debit card!

tb

OMG. I was too excited to see currency probably didn't even notice the card was sticking out.

At the airport, all merchants will accept credit cards. The rest of the country: sporadically at best (people don't own credit cards and the fees are too high for merchants compared to 1ct per debit transaction). But you'll need a PIN everywhere. Only way to possibly get around it is having lunch inside an international hotel.
Not sure why the US is the only place on earth where CCs are still given out without a PIN on it by default.

Same reason we just got chips, still take people's credit cards to the back of the restaurant, it's because we love credit card fraud. Gives some people something to do.

It blows my mind that banks still issue cards without PINs and don't event let you manage the PIN online if there isn't a default set...

I have never encountered a POS machine that required PIN entry for cards without PINs, but a lot of POS machines only support Union Pay.

In Europe!!??

So glad you got it sorted and restores my faith that there are decent and good people out there. If only there was an app to identify people like that ! And just as an aside, I have lost count of the amount of times in the US that I stick my chip card in and am standing there hovering my digits over the keypad, until I am whisked back to the 1800s and asked to dip the quill into some ink and sign some velum! :)

My bad. I mistakenly thought you were commenting on China because I didn't read your post thoroughly enough.

This. Amazing that the rest of the world brings the chip reader to the table and yet we gladly hand it over to whomever and let it disappear for a few minutes. We are dopes.

Another flaw in the US implementation is that many machines still support hand written tips, which effectively opens up doors for fraud in what is advertised as an air tight system. While I don't think machines can or should eliminate the tipping culture, I'd feel a lot safer if I was forced to add the tip electronically, and confirm by entering a PIN. I'd also like to see the baseline reset to 15%, plus 10% and 12% options for bad service.

This is the way in Canada. Although several versions exist, the most common one (for me) goes like this:
Turn unit to customer -> OK -> Confirming amount $nnn. Add tip? -> Yes ($) / Yes (%) / No. --> Enter tip amount ($ / %) -> Confirm new amount OK --> Enter PIN (if card inserted) or tap card --> Approved, printing copies for client and merchant.

It's a similar process in the UK.

I believe this has a lot to do with cost effectiveness of avoiding fraud. I used to work for a CC operator, specifically calculating monthly losses and the talk was always that in the American market there was less of a need for security measures as they were expensive and their losses weren't that significant. As the cost to implement this solutions drops I believe the US market will finally be able to justify its installation across the country.

Sorry if went too far off topic here.

While I can appreciate this position to an extent, my --perhaps mistaken-- assumption was that the costs of swapping out old POS machines for new POS machines was/is substantially higher than the incremental cost of requiring PIN entry as a base level feature on the new machines. To put is slightly differently, why bother with the hassle of migrating to new machines at all if they aren't meaningfully better than what they replaced?

While I have sympathy, I'm curious ... did the aliens swoop down and whisk you off to China? How did you manage to get into this most interesting situation?