Any advice - Direct Bank Transfer - Continental Banks.

[kedo]

Hate to think like a thief but foremost in my mind is, do YOU have protection with this method of payment? Common MO is pulling funds after you mail or doing the quivalent of a 'charge back" after item is in scammer's hands. Can you be sure the money, which is a large amount, will stay in your account?

I thought that once the money was moved it stays. Don't know! I shall have a talk with my bank tomorrow. As lejoueurdepipeau says it's commonplace in the rest of Europe. Why use Paypal when you have a free service?

[lejoueurdepipeau]

Just out of interest, do you think it's because the French don't use credit cards in the way we do?

The French remain very loyal to the cheque and they are used on a daily basis in supermarkets unlike in the UK (where I understand they are no longer allowed). The cheque is very safe as you run the risk of having your bank account closed down if one of your cheques bounces. There is no need to wait for them to clear here.

The French very rarely use credit cards (well at least, not in rural Normandy maybe it's different in Paris?) - there is not the same culture of debt being acceptable here - but debit cards are appearing more. A couple of years ago if you produced a card of any sort to pay for anything it marked you out as English before you opened your mouth!!

[ArtisanUK]

I don't know if cheques are no longer accepted in supermarkets here ... I live in a rural location and we too tend to rely on cheques.

I had heard about the French (and German) aversion to credit but never spoken to anyone about it.

Our banks are now talking about scrapping cheques altogether - it feels like a disasterous move to me.

[kengillam]

The thing to do is start using cheques more, it's a case of use it or lose it.

[Gothicina]

I thought that once the money was moved it stays. Don't know! I shall have a talk with my bank tomorrow. As lejoueurdepipeau says it's commonplace in the rest of Europe. Why use Paypal when you have a free service.

The safest way with bank transfer with people you don't know, is to have the money transferred into a savings account, not a current account.
That way even if a scammer did get the details they couldn't set up a direct debit or standing order on it.

[MHTTrading]

We have used bank transfer on certain large orders, all you need do is give the buyer your IBAN number and BIC number which is obtainable from your local branch, once the funds are cleared into your account the buyer can't claw it back

[lofty100e]

The French remain very loyal to the cheque and they are used on a daily basis in supermarkets unlike in the UK (where I understand they are no longer allowed). The cheque is very safe as you run the risk of having your bank account closed down if one of your cheques bounces. There is no need to wait for them to clear here.

That is the difference then, here in Britain the only sanction is an overdrawn fee, although that can be upto £50 in some cases, depending on your bank.

I am surprised to find out that cheques are still it use in France, I have met up with quite a few European folks who tell me that cheques are redundant in their Countries. Although none of them were French.

From what I have read they have strong incentives for keeping your account in order in the USA; apparently if a cheque bounces it is reported to the police as fraud who can then take action.

Unfortunatley it has been decided the British cheque books will be phased out within the next 10 years. The worrying thing with that is that when the British banking industry catches up with the rest of the world with instant transfer. Scamming would become easier, atleast with a cheque you have a few days to stop it as the postal sytem in the Country is quite slow. Whereas with a BT the money is gone immediatley with no chance of recall.

The strange thing is though that banks are telling people who have been defrauded by BT that they were stupid to give their bank details to someone they didn't know.

Totally ignoring the fact that folks have been doing exactly that with cheques for a very long time. Also they are expecting us to trust what they are now describing as unsafe practice to be widely accepted when the cheques go. In the same way that chip & pin is allegedly safer than using signatures on bank cards.

There is only one name for it......MADNESS!

[hypn0t0ad]

The safest way with bank transfer with people you don't know, is to have the money transferred into a savings account, not a current account.
That way even if a scammer did get the details they couldn't set up a direct debit or standing order on it.

That's true and sound advice.

I found out to my cost a couple of years ago that bank transfer payments (into a current account) were not quite so pain and hassle free as I first thought.

I had a couple of NPB transactions where people had asked me for my bank a/c details - only the same info as is immediately visible on a cheque/debit card - and so I provided them without too much trepidation.

Over the next 6 months there were repeated attempts at setting up scam insurance policies using my bank a/c details for direct debit payments. I never lost out financially because I checked (and still check) my online statements daily but I did resort to switching banks in the end.

As Goth has already said a bank transfer into a savings account is pretty much scammer/risk free AFAIK (and preferable to deepening PP's pockets even further ).

[kedo]

Thanks for the info everyone!

[lofty100e]

My advice would be to avoid Nationwide Buiding Society, their customer service is awful. They do everything they can to stop you reporting crime, eventually one of the few helpfull people I talked to gave me the phone number of their fraud investigators; when I finally go through I was told very abruptly that I shouldn't be phoning that number and should go through the call centre. Who were worse than useless (but then they always are, what can you expect if you staff them with people who are either untrained or stupid, maybe both).

The situation in England is that the crime can only be reported by the bank / building society (strangely not by the person(s) whose account has been plundered. Or at least that was what I was told by West Midlands police when my account was scammed by the same group Hypn0t0ad mentioned. Despite continued pressure from me Nationwide REFUSED to investigate the problem and classified it as clerical error. As a result of this the police were not able to folllow up on an investigation that was going on.

I suspect that the reason they did not investigate and refer it was that the police would have asked very embarrassing questions about their security systems. They (Nationwide) have proved themselves to be very untrustworthy in my experience.