ATM service with a smile...

He had gone to Clarke Quay with his friends and needed cash to pay for dinner.

Mr Wong Liang Yuan, 26, went to a DBS ATM to make a cash withdrawal. But the marketing manager was not prepared for what happened next.

"The ATM went crazy, issuing receipt after receipt with smiley faces on it," he said.

"I didn't know what was going on, but I knew something wasn't right."

He received five smiley receipts along with the $50 he had requested.

Concerned about a possible security breach, Mr Wong called DBS on the spot to report the apparent malfunction.

"A staff member told me that they would look into the matter," he said.

Mr Wong quickly realised that he was not the only bank customer to have received the strange receipts - he found similar printouts left on top of the ATM he had used.

When he got home, he checked his account balance online and was relieved to find no money missing from his POSB savings account.

A DBS spokesman told my paper: "This was an isolated case of a printer malfunction at an ATM.

"Please be assured that the printing error has no implication on a customer's account or banking transactions."

An engineer has already been dispatched to fix the printer, DBS said.

my paper understands that the smiley faces are printed by default whenever a printer encounters an error.

Bank security was in the spotlight earlier this year after a card-skimming scam came to light. The syndicate responsible stole money from customers who used two DBS ATMs in Bugis.

In January, fraudsters stole about $1million from the accounts of almost 700 customers by making withdrawals in Malaysia.

DBS has 4.3 million customers and an islandwide network of about 1,300 ATMs and cash- deposit machines.