E-Checks

[lordevor_0]

A verified eBay user has offered to pay with an E-Check.  Is this legal?  He does not have a credit/debit card and closed his PayPal account to to issues with them.  He said the purchase will go thru eBay after the E-Check clears my bank account.    The item is $1000 so its not a smaller purchase.  Please offer me advise.

[inhawaii]

Does your listing say they you accept e-check as payment?

That answers your question.

[ittybitnot]

@lordevor_0 

Where/how were you to receive this e-check?  Did you answer a "text me" scammer that wanted your email address, or phone number?  Did they ask for your bank account info?  

Not to sound condescending, but you are basically a "newbie" seller.  Listing an expensive item right out of the gate is going to attract scammers like "white on rice"  or "flies on -----" .   Read here, do a bit of research on:

text me scammers

change of address scammers

cheap trinket sams

fake tracking scams (for returns if you are a seller)
etc. 

etc. 

Get some experience first.  PLEASE!!!!! 

[simba6]

Your "buyer" needs to pay the way they are supposed to.   If a purchase has already been made,  be sure to file an unpaid case to get your selling fees back they they fail to do so. 

[wrong66]

I really don't know.

[a_c_green · Accepted solution]

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@lordevor_0 wrote:

A verified eBay user has offered to pay with an E-Check.  Is this legal?  He does not have a credit/debit card and closed his PayPal account to to issues with them.  He said the purchase will go thru eBay after the E-Check clears my bank account.    The item is $1000 so its not a smaller purchase.  Please offer me advise.

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That's a lot of bafflegab getting flung around.

To begin with, an e-Check used to be a payment through PayPal that was funded from the buyer's bank account, meaning that PayPal would send the seller a Ready to Ship notification only after the buyer's bank funds had reached their PayPal account, which was then transferred into your PayPal account (the seller).

However, your supposed buyer has said that he closed his PayPal account, and there is no "e-Check" he can send directly to your bank, nor do you collect eBay payments directly to your bank anyway; they go directly to eBay via eBay's payment processor, which is Adyen.

e-Checks were only relevant when PayPal was your payment processor, and they no longer are. You can still send PayPal an e-Check in terms of building your own PayPal balance from your bank's checking account, and after that you can buy things from eBay using your PayPal account, but that's not what your buyer is going to do, because again, by his own admission, he doesn't have a PayPal account.

So there is no e-Check to wait for, and no payment direct to your bank account from the buyer. The best you would get is some official-looking (but completely fake) directive telling you to ship and upload a tracking number (somewhere) before you would see funds in your account. Needless to say, no funds will ever appear.

Ignore further communication from this guy. He has everything he needs in order to pay you if he really wanted to, including a big Pay button in the original listing. After four full days from the end of the listing, you will be able to cancel with the reason of Buyer Did Not Pay (that reason does not appear until the fifth day, so wait for it to show up), he will get an Unpaid slap on his record, and you can relist. Keep us posted please!

[gemarakop_trading]

Your a a new seller you have and will attract the worst humanity has to offer. RUN

[the_fancy_fox]

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@toysaver wrote:

It's being sold for pick up only- I wouldn't even accept cash from him.  

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Not unless you have one of those pens that marks fake bills.

Personally I would tell them you only take payment though ebay or cash on delivery.  Though with this guy I would be leery of meeting up with them. 

[stephenmorgan]

I have Local Pickup turned off but I am able to list Check as a payment method.  I would accept a personal check or eCheck as payment.  I would not ship until it has cleared.  I would rather a check than paying 3% for someone else to manage the payment.

This has nothing to do with if the original poster is being scammed as I do not know.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/265821328241#payCntId

click on see details to the right of Discover Card.

[a_c_green]

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@stephenmorgan wrote:

I would accept a personal check or eCheck as payment.  I would not ship until it has cleared.

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The problem with accepting a check (even a cashier's check) is that your bank will provisionally clear it as a courtesy to you within a day or so, but when it eventually reaches the bank that supposedly issued it, it can bounce hard, and your bank will come after you to reclaim the money that they fronted to you earlier. 

I would accept a USPS Money Order, as your local post office can verify it for you, even if they don't have enough cash on hand to pay you directly. If they can't cover a cash payout for you at that time, you can still deposit that in your bank with confidence and it will clear like a check. (The highest USPS Money Order I ever cashed at the post office was in the area of $575-$600. It helped that I was in downtown Chicago at the time, at a big branch that had plenty of cash on hand.)

[mam98031]

@lordevor_0 

Paypal has an option to pay via Echeck, but Ebay does not.  Ebay isn't going to allow an Echeck payment.  Payment has to be via cash from the buyer's PP account or they can chose a debit card or credit card they have set up with PayPal, but not an echeck

Echecks are NOT a scam, they are a real thing, it is just a payment method that Ebay doesn't accept.

[pburn]

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@a_c_green wrote:

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@stephenmorgan wrote:

I would accept a personal check or eCheck as payment.  I would not ship until it has cleared.

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The problem with accepting a check (even a cashier's check) is that your bank will provisionally clear it as a courtesy to you within a day or so, but when it eventually reaches the bank that supposedly issued it, it can bounce hard, and your bank will come after you to reclaim the money that they fronted to you earlier. 

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Um, not sure that's quite accurate. Unless they're counterfeit or otherwise fraudulent (which is a whole different issue), legitimate cashier's checks don't bounce. They're paid for up front by the customer and drawn on the funds of the bank, not an individual's account, quite similar to a money order.

[itsjustasprain]

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@pburn wrote:
Um, not sure that's quite accurate. Unless they're counterfeit or otherwise fraudulent (which is a whole different issue), legitimate cashier's checks don't bounce. 

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I assume we are talking about counterfeit checks and counterfeit money orders here - yes. Fake cashiers checks have been around for many years. That is an old scam - not a new one.

[rosachs]

If he's doing an eCheck, there must be a bank account somewhere to back that up.  eBay accepts eChecks and will process them just like any other payment, as far as I know.  I really don't pay attention to HOW a customer chooses to pay, only that they did.  And that eBay has handled that transaction.

Sounds way to much like a scam to me.  I'd pass and just tell them you only accept eBay payments for eBay sales.  If they then ask you to sell to them off-site, report them to eBay.  That's another big scam move -- taking the seller away from the protections offered by eBay, such as they are.

Besides, the FVF you paid on the sale already included the payment processing fee.

-Bob.

[rosachs]

OK - parts of what I said up there are incorrect and eBay won't let me edit the post.  They gave me an edit option, then told me the time limit had expired.  Sheesh.

So eChecks are not what I thought they still were.  Still learning something new every day......

-Bob.

[mam98031]

OK just to make this clear.  A buyer can NOT pay with an Echeck.  Doesn't matter if they want to or not, Ebay will NOT accept that as a form of payment.  The forms of payment accepted on Ebay is stated on every listing.  Echecks is not among them.  So there is no problem.