ATMs very rarely inform users before they put their card in the slot whether it’s the kind of machine that uses a motor to suck your card into the machine. If yes, then avoiding the machine is a good idea.
The question is, how do you find out in advance whether the machine has a motor? Obviously if you test it on your actual valid bank card that you intend to use for the transaction, you may not get it back.
So my first thought was carry expired old bank cards which can be sacrificed. Stick the card in and if a motor pulls it in, hit the cancel button and try it on the next ATM until you find an ATM that does not suck the card in. This still has issues. The machine can vary well confiscate the card merely on the basis of being expired (thus invalid). Sure, it’s a sacrificial card but I don’t have 100+ such cards to spare. And also those dead cards will have my name on them and the ATM network could blackball my name.
So my next thought is to cut a rectangle from a plastic food container to use as a dummy card. It’s still dicey because criminals are deliberately sticking thin plastic sheets into card slots to cause the next real inserted card to get jammed (this is in fact one of many reasons why legit users should avoid the motorised card slots in the first place). But if you cause things to jam up, you could get treated like a criminal (camera → facial recognition.. etc).
Maybe loyalty cards.. grab a stack of loyalty cards from a grocery store and use those as dummy cards. Better ideas?
There are bank limits at ATMs and also separate limits set by the ATM operators themselves. In the msg you are replying, I described exceeding the bank’s limit when using ATMs (which was lower than the limit of the ATM itself in that case). I was in a foreign country pulling out foreign currency. There is no foreign branch for the bank.
W.r.t. emptying your whole account, I suspect you are talking from a US standpoint. A European who tries that will be turned away. Someone tried (in Belgium) asking for €10k cash of her own money over the counter. The bank refused and also called the police. The police interrogated her and made a report. She was not charged with anything though. In Belgium, cash transactions above €3k are unlawful so my guess is amounts above that are regarded as suspicious. Contracts with European banks include withdrawal limits.
I doubt empathy is why they have a limit. Why would they care? What I would expect them to care about is the fee revenue. The fee tends to be flat (DCC aside). So imposing a low limit forces more transactions, thus more fees.
ATM operators conceal¹ their limits but the rumour is that ATMs have much lower limits on foreign cards than domestic cards. The ATM charges no fee on eurozone cards and has a €2k² limit for those cards, but foreign cards have a €500² limit (which they collect a ~€4 fee from). Because of that fee, of course it’s in the consumer’s interest to make a large withdrawal to minimise their net overhead. And of course ATM operators want the contrary.
¹ Geldmaat even lies about their limits, I believe. According to the geldmaat.nl website, there is no ATM-imposed limit. They claim consumers are limited only by their bank’s limit. I don’t believe the claim. I’m sure they are lying.
² According to rumour.