Internet bank fraud has reached ridiculous proportions and I would lay the blame for that squarely with the banks.
They are trying to force their customers to trade exclusively with debit or credit cards – so they can coin the fees that go with each transaction. Cash deposits chews off another chunk in fees – and the winner is :- The Bank.
It is so easy to cut and paste “Proof of Payment” print-outs to pass on to service providers as the real thing. Unless you are from the same bank, you are in limbo for a couple of days – forced to trust the payer that the Proof was actually legit. The other option would be to hold on to the goods until such time the payment shows up in your bank account – unpleasant for both honest payer and service provider.
Why do we have to wait (normally) 3 working days before that money lands in your bank account? That amount immediately disappears from the payer’s bank account, so obviously in those couple of days that the money spends in limbo earns the banks a sizeable amount of interest. It is not as if it is a bag full of banknotes that has to be dragged across to another bank building, so there is no excuse for internet banking transactions taking that long to be finalised.
Cheques used to be the most commonly used method of payment. Then you got dishonest people who screwed it up for everyone. We had “the cheque is in the mail”. More often than not, the cheque never arrived. Or when it arrived, there were no funds when you tried to cash it, or buyers would take the goods and then stop the cheque at the bank. Eventually businesses had to insist on the cheques clearing before releasing goods – inconveniencing both payer and service provider. The result is that these days, there is hardly any body or business prepared to accept a cheque as payment anymore.
I find it strange that more people are not up in arms about those days that their money spends in limbo. Come on guys, I am sure the banking industry can sort this out if enough of us make a stink about it.
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