Hi,
Wondering if anyone can give be a wee bit of advice on this…
I sold a whistle on ebay to a person in Poland. Payment was supposed to be paypal but the buyer wants to pay by bank transfer…
This is the message I got -
“I have won the auction ,so thank You!
I would like to pay by money transfere from the bank,as I always do for e-bay,because of the currency change it is the best for me.I also dont have a pay-pal account.
I need Your bank account number,IBAN,SWIFT and full name for the transaction at the bank office.”
The buyer has no ebay history. Is it safe to supply these details.
A paypal account costs nothing. They offer better exchange rates than most banks. S/he should suck it up. I’ve done paypal exchanges with at least one Pole, and it was no problem.
Dunno about safe or not, but I just wouldn’t let the buyer (?) boss me about that. It’s your auction, you’ve stated the terms and they’ve ignored them when they could have asked first!
Hello Bogman,
Is it safe? Absolutely not!
I supervise banking operations and compliance for a major financial firm in the US.
DO NOT EVER GIVE OUT YOUR BANKING INFORMATION TO SOMEONE OVER THE INTERNET. Your bank account WILL be emptied in a few minutes. I guarantee you it is a scam. 100% certainty. Paypal was invented to prevent fraud, and there is no legitimate reason Paypal can’t be used. I see these all the time and it amazes me that there are still people who fall for scam artist excuses and then have their entire life savings stolen.
Thanks WhistlingRufus. I’ve heard nothing since sending a message saying it had to be paypal. I’ll give them a short time to reply and then I’ll report to buyer to ebay. Thanks to everyone for contributions.
If you think there’s a chance the buyer is legit, you could suggest a Moneygram wire transfer, which amounts to an anonymous bank transfer. Pick a Moneygram destination near you, which doesn’t have to be your own bank, and there are Moneygram sending agents all over Poland. The rate will be close to the bank rate, and the fees are better than some other services. If the buyer is unable to meet your original Paypal terms, then s/he should be willing to pick up those costs. Good luck!
A person with zero feedback on eBay never gets the luxury of calling the shots, especially when they are the purchaser. The seller sets the terms of payment, and I’m betting yours requested payment by PayPal.
But to answer your question, this is almost certainly a scam.
May I ask how can you be so sure about that?
I mean, I know little or nothing about how this things work so I am inclined to trust you and I have no reasons to challenge your word and expertise, but my nose tells me that this is a rather bold statement, one that certainly, to me, would need a bit of elaboration.
When we give our bank details to a client in order to receive a payment, don’t we give him/her the coordinates, the “address” if I can simplify in this way, of our bank so that the money can go from A (the client’s bank) to B (us, through our bank)?
One thing would be to give our credit card number to someone, but these details aren’t something unidirectional in that they allow money in and not out?
I’d say go PayPal. I’ve used it with transactions from all over the world with no problems.
Even if this customer is legit, you might get a surprise if your bank adds a large fee to accept an international money order or check. My bank did that to me years ago. Luckily, I was a long term customer and they waived it as a courtesy. PayPal causes no such problems.
A quick google search will find plenty of ways that someone can scam you with a bank account number. It’s also possible to pay for purchases using e-checks with a routing number and bank account number. Routing numbers can be found online in seconds, so if you give someone your bank account number you’re basically inviting them to steal from you.
Another common scam is that the scammer will “overpay” and then ask for the difference back, and then you refund them and later find out that the original payment to you bounced.
It’s usually easy to spot these scams a mile away as they don’t put the effort into being logical or providing a plausible back story for their request of alternate payment. The fact that the guy has zero ebay feedback but says he “always pays this way on ebay” is a big giant red flag.
Peter is right. It is your auction and you are the boss around here. Paypal is preferred over eBay as it is safe.
Sharing banking details is not a good idea, trust me. There are great hackers around the world. Giving them digits can give them great access to your account.
Sounds like Phishing. You can immediately reject the sale by filling a complain on Paypal that the buyer does not meet your criteria on payment methods.
You can also inform that the buyer is asking for banking details which you are not comfortable with. The ebay agent will advise you on how to cancel the transaction
Oh, I have no doubt about it, but I have doubts the number alone (i.e. w/o dumb actions/judgment from the account holder) can do the trick, that’s what I was asking.
Still, dumb actions/judgment required from the holder part.
I agree with all those who advised bogman to require the buyer to use paypal and not accept his conditions, I was just curious to know how WhistlingRufus could be so quick in equating the giving of the number with the 100% certainty of being scammed (w/o dumb actions/judgment from bogman’s part).
Maybe cash is old-fashioned nowadays. But again, I wouldn’t discount Moneygram as a practical option. There are honest people in the world who have neither credit cards nor a bank account, and who may offer embarrassed excuses for the lack. Been there, done that.
Instant transfer, cash in hand before shipping, and no exchange of any personal information except name. It’s a very reasonable way of doing it.
Today I asked my bank guy and well, he confirmed my skepticism.
He said that it is nearly impossible to do evil with just the account coordinates to receive a bank transfer.
As I suspected this is a unilateral procedure only good for receiving money, not giving it away. It is not like giving away a credit card number.
So, although I still personally think that the buyer should do as bogman wishes and not the other way around, I hardly think that accepting a bank transfer would do him any harm as WhistlingRufus suggested.
I only jut noticed this. I didn’t chip in earlier because I thought the cautions had been given. I have first-hand experience of an almost 4-figure sum (sterling) being taken from a non-personal UK bank account by someone who only had the account details. It is possibly due to cost cutting on banking procedures (similar to the way they don’t check signatures on many cheques). Since it was obviously a fraudulent debit made possible by the bank’s short-cuts the the bank accepted responsibility and re-instated the money. But it was a great inconvenience and it was lucky that it was spotted fairly soon.
However, as said above, it is only the information that is on your cheques. So the moral is to keep an eye on your bank statements. Apparently accounts from corporate bodies are more susceptible but only because the fraudsters think that unexpected debits may take longer to be spotted. They have to withdraw the money from the receiving account and vanish before they are found out.
I have paid for items using “e-checks” with my bank account number & routing number, so I don’t have a doubt that an unsavory person could do the same thing if they got my account number. Yes, it’s the same info that’s on a check, but people can do fraudulent things with checks quite easily too.
I would not necessarily trust the word of a bank teller as the definitive proof nothing evil can be done. Talk to someone in fraud prevention who’s job it is to really know this stuff.
For those of you that are interested in this sort of thing, a rather interesting hack was done to a technology blogger this past summer. In response to it Apple & Amazon actually changed some of their security protocols. I find it kind of fascinating how the hackers will use a vulnerability with one system to exploit and gain access to another. In this case, a hacker who wanted control of a twitter account noticed the guy had an Apple email address. He was then able to call Amazon and add a credit card to the guy’s Amazon account using his email address, then called Amazon right back and said he forgot his password. He supplied the credit card number he had just given them and the email address to get a password reset. He then logged into amazon and looked up transaction details, including the last 4 digits of the credit cards used (amazon only displays the last 4-digits). Apple only requires those same last 4-digits to verify iCloud accounts. Long story short, the hacker got access to guy’s email, wiped ALL his devices, reset his passwords for everything important and basically made it impossible for the guy to regain control of his accounts. All of this guy’s online banking details were readily accessible and vulnerable, but the hacker was only interested in hijacking his twitter account.
It’s an interesting story. If someone can accomplish so much destruction with relatively small chunks of semi-public info, think of what kind of havoc someone could cause with actual bank account numbers.
