Thank you, I did use that link to initially find the ATM. I have emailed the contact via that site but yet to hear anything back.
I suspected this could be a lesson learned. It was an initial test, £40 in, and got £22.xx back out, which felt a little harsh.
It's good to confirm I am partially on the right tracks. That site doesn't give much in terms of fee's, I think there are only a handful available, unless I am viewing incorrectly.
We're talking about a buying fee around 45 % which should be classified as a felony... Next time you should pay higher attention to the screen that appears just before you confirm the transaction. Sadly it seems that only one BATM in UK reports the buying fee[1] - 12 % - but it's still far away from the one that you were hit with. From what I could see on coinatmradar.com most of the BATM that exist in the UK are from General Bytes[2] and while the fees that are employed in the transactions are chosen by whoever buys the equipment from them, you should try to find the one that offers the lowest value. Assuming that the interface hasn't changed much, I found a video tutorial[3] regarding buying BTC in a BATM that uses a machine made by General Bytes that may help you understand where these machines grab their profit. If you look at one of the early shots of the video you'll see this screen:
In it the machine claims that the
buy exchange rate of 1 BTC is equal to £5,208.18. If we go further into the video, and assuming it was filmed right after the transaction, the market value of 1 BTC was £4,954.98, which is equal to a gap of £253.20, which roughly translates to a
4.86 % price increase. This means that you are already paying a higher margin than the current price on the market, thus generating revenue for the BATM operator.
Going back a bit on the video you'll see the following screen which shows you the fee you are going to pay (if you accept) and you'll get the information regarding how much you'll get in this exchange:
The fixed fee is 2.50 GBP for this transaction to occur. The value of the BTC that you'll get is fairly simple to calculate - They just take the £20, subtract the 2.50 fee and divide it by the current exchange fee (£5,208.18), netting the user 0.003359 BTC. This transaltes to global fee of around
16.80 %! Altough high, bear in mind that there's always a price to pay considering that you're using a machine such as a BATM vs buying it in an exchange where you'll need to complete KYC to buy/sell BTC (for example).
Don't have high hopes in being reimbursed by the BATM operator - you agreed to pay the fee so he doesn't have the legal obligation to (re)pay you with some % of the fees. My suggestion is that you don't let yourself fall into one of these traps again and be very aware of the fees that are being charged to you no matter where you get your BTC from (be it from an exchange, p2p, BATM, etc). Usually the more anonymous the method, the higher the fee you'll end up paying though ...
[1]
https://coinatmradar.com/charts/buy-fees/united-kingdom/[2]
https://www.generalbytes.com/en/[3]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Os6ydYe2Uw
