Andrew O'Neill
Moderator
Make sure you check that all the details on the cheque are correct before you mail it...
Salad, haircut, pizza, type of birth, . . . .. what else can we give back that is rightly his????
All very interesting. I no longer sell on Ebay due to their silly policies giving everything to the buyers and no protection to the sellers. But I do buy small items on occasion, like fountain pens, ink and the like. Not many good photo gear or supply bargains any more, I've not bought any of these in ages.
Banks here in Australia are essentially fee-grabbing merchants who charge like wounded bulls for almost every so-called 'service' they offer. For my own protection, I won't write or accept cheques, and I'm now making good use of PayPal to pay for many small things I wouldn't have considered before, even utilities. Their protection policies are still good and I've found on the two occasions I had disputes with sellers, they came to my assistance quickly and made good decisions. So PayPal, yes.
Even so-called certified or bank cheques are suspect nowadays. Some years ago I sold a clapped-out Rolleiflex (at an almost giveaway price) to a buyer from China who wanted to pay by bank cheque, and I stupidly (okay, sillily) agreed. Two weeks later a letter with a vague postal return address arrived with a bank cheque for two and a half times the payment amount, followed by an email from the buyer who apologised for his "mistake" - and then asked that I deposit the difference to a HKSB account, which would have cost me a massive fee anyway as it was an overseas transaction. I phoned PayPal and on their advice, cancelled the transaction on the basis of "wrong payment" and returned the bank cheque to the postal address in, I recall, Shanghai. I then cancelled the Ebay sale and that was the end of it. The camera went to an Australian buyer who paid immediately via PayPal. I stopped selling to overseas buyers and I now also rarely buy items from overseas on Ebay unless they are small things not worth much - obviously I pay by PayPal.
Other camera sellers I've spoken to have reported similar cases. It seems to be a well-established con game operating out of certain foreign countries.
Avoiding tax on my sales has never been an issue, as an age pensioner in Australia I have a generous tax exemption and I never quite make it to above the income limits. A frugal life is a good life...
Apologies for my long-winded 'example' but to me it served as a timely warning of what can go wrong with payments from dubious sources for Ebay transactions.
No, that's the whole point of PayPal, it's secure.
Hae no idea how anyone can steal my personal information from a check.
Someone just used my VISA card to charge up stuff on Facebook. But VISA caught it and canceled it after checking with me. So I needed a new card. This happens every once in a while. It's easy to copy info since you give your card to a waiter to charge a bill. You never know if they're copying the info from the card and then passing it on.From The Motley Fool: How Writing Personal Checks Can Expose You to Fraud
All the information fit to steal
A check is a treasure trove of information for fraudsters. Think about all the personal data you want to hide from thieves and then think about what's printed on the front of your personal checks: names, addresses, the banking institution, the bank's routing number, and the check holder's account number. Even worse, when writing a check at a retail location, you may be required to write your driver license number on the front of the check; in a few states it's the check writer's Social Security number.
With access to this data, thieves can pay for items online with just the account and routing numbers. Many prepaid cards can also have money transferred to them from a bank account by using the same information. That's to say nothing of the risks of identity theft or an account takeover once this information is compromised.
In Canada, many banks won't certify cheques any more.
There is a bunch of reasons for that, but the primary one is that the cheque clearing system no longer returns the physical cheques to the branch. Instead, cheques are imaged digitally and the originals are destroyed.
Certification has lost much of its benefit anyways, because most now don't deposit cheques physically, they deposit them using an app on their phone.
And that is the reason banks still put a hold on funds deposited by way of certified cheque, because they have no way of knowing whether the cheque holder has already used their phone to deposit the funds into another account.
In the US when I purchase a Certified Check the bank withdraws the money from my account and then prints the CC.
I suppose someone could somehow use the banking information on the bottom of the check for nefarious purposes but I've never heard of it happening.
If there was a chance of a forged CC I do not believe they would give me money that exceeded what was in my account.
unbelievable the amount of hoops someone will jump through, so they won't have to pay taxes on money that they earned from a side hustle or whatever ..
And who puts their address, DL, and other information on a personal check?
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