Yeah, that makes sense. The image could just be a jpeg that's displayed before you enter your card. All they need to do is send out an employee with a digital camera! And it wouldn't take too long either....ATMs are rare where I come from.

SMS is a stupid service, in fairness. It costs a huge amount to send a tiny bit of information. It should be free of charge. Think of it this way:

160 character limit. Let make it 200 characters including the header (time sent etc)
So in that case, you're being charged 9c (in Ireland, thats what I pay) per 200 bytes and you want to send a text to America from Europe.

If you wanted to send (for whatever reason) 1mb of information via this service, it would cost €471 (737 USD) ! It would be cheaper to get a flight and hand the receiver a damn floppy with your data on it.

Its just another example of the consumer being completely ripped off. I can't wait until SMS is dead and gets replaced by proper messaging services.