Tamarisk Circuitry announced the recall on Thursday after tracing the error to a software update on its SahmBox 4 checkout terminals. The bug appeared when the terminals refreshed their optional dollar-to-pound display following Wednesday’s decision by the US central bank to leave interest rates unchanged, which sent the dollar lower.
The company says 86,400 units shipped since March are affected, including 14,200 currently operating in Egypt. Its review of payment records found no transactions settled at the false rate, but it identified 1,126 terminals that displayed the distorted quote. Shops have been told to unplug the machines and switch to other payment methods.
How the quote went wrong
The terminals use a data service to show merchants an approximate equivalent when a customer pays with a foreign card. Tamarisk said the service changed the format of its exchange-rate feed after the dollar’s fall; the terminal software then removed the decimal point, turning a quote near E£50 per dollar into E£5,040.
“The screen made a routine currency update look like a price from another planet,” said Barlas Duygulu, Tamarisk’s product director. He said the company’s payment processor calculates actual charges separately, and that the false display did not alter settlement amounts.
The screen made a routine currency update look like a price from another planet.
Barlas Duygulu, product director
Meg Yii Mahmusin, who manages a mobile-phone shop in central Cairo, said her terminal showed the wrong figure for about 12 minutes on Thursday morning. “A customer pointed at it and thought we were trying to charge him thousands of pounds. We stopped taking card payments until the screen went dark,” she said.
Shops face a quick swap
Tamarisk has set aside E£42 million (about €780,000) for collection, replacement and retailer support. It expects to exchange units in Cairo and Alexandria by 3 November, with other Egyptian shops able to book a collection online or at service desks. The company says it will cover delivery and provide temporary payment readers.
Diethard Hesse, a payment-systems engineer who advises Egyptian retailers, said the mistake came from a basic mismatch between data formats rather than a breakdown in banking systems. “A display can still cause real trouble,” he said. “People trust the number in front of them, and shop staff have to explain why it is wrong.”
The Consumer Product Office, a government body that handles consumer recalls, said it had asked Tamarisk to report daily on returned units and customer complaints. It has advised retailers not to rely on screenshots or printed quotes from affected terminals, and said the recall will remain in force until the company demonstrates that the replacement software handles decimal changes correctly.
Tamarisk said it would release the corrected software only after tests with three independent payment processors and a fresh review of its currency-data feed. Retailers can check a terminal’s serial number through the company’s recall portal; the firm says any unit in the affected production run must be replaced, even if its display has never shown the false quote.
