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oldcynic | 7 years ago

They do. If I have someone's bank details I can transfer for free, instantly. (OK it sometimes takes a few minutes at weekends). There's two issues with ever using that for online payment:

1. There is no mechanism to obtain a refund for a mistake - eg I mistype the account number, someone else gets the money. Banks won't reverse but ask the payee to refund. If they still exist and are willing to cooperate. This is the route used for many, many scams like Microsoft calling because they noticed a fault with your Windows.

2. There is no protection under the Consumer Credit Act to obtain refund in the event the company goes bust or the product is defective and they won't refund. Credit cards have to provide that.

I use it with friends in preference to any other method, especially Paypal though.

discuss

Certhas|7 years ago

With SofortBanking and similar services it is becoming more common to use this to pay online. It eliminates much of the issues you mention.

Kliment|7 years ago

Sofort are problematic because they a) access your account via credentials that it's against bank ToS to share and b) they scrape and store (and likely sell) transaction data unrelated to the current transaction because they have access to your account.

def_true_false|7 years ago

> If I have someone's bank details I can transfer for free, instantly.

> There is no mechanism to obtain a refund for a mistake

Neither of these is true for SEPA.

cpmouter|7 years ago

You can't "mistype the account number", as it has control digits. I mean, there's a possibility, but it's really slim.

oldcynic|7 years ago

Credit cards definitely have check digits, pretty sure bank accounts don't, though I'm not certain.

Common enough that there's been a fair bit in the media[0] regularly, ever since instant transfers took off, and warnings from the Financial Ombudsman[1].

There's also been stories of people randomly discovering a few thousand appearing in their account and stupidly going out to spend it that day.

[0] First link in results https://www.telegraph.co.uk/personal-banking/current-account... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-22815716