How to Check a Payment Request Before You Send Money

01Know which methods can be undone

This is the part worth knowing before you need it. Payment methods differ enormously in what happens when a payment turns out to be fraudulent, and the differences do not follow how modern or how convenient the method feels.

Methods that generally carry a route to dispute:

• Credit and debit cards, which carry chargeback rights against the merchant. This is the strongest ordinary consumer protection there is.
• Payment services used for their goods-and-services flow, which typically include a purchase-protection process with a defined claim window.

Methods that are effectively final once sent:

• Bank transfers between accounts, including instant transfer rails. Recall depends on the receiving bank and on the money still being there, which after a fraudulent transfer it usually is not.
• Peer-to-peer app payments sent as a personal transfer to someone you do not know. These are built for paying people you trust and are treated as authorised by you.
• Wire transfers, especially international ones.
• Gift cards. Once the code is read out, the value is gone and there is no account to trace.
• Cryptocurrency. There is no reversal mechanism at all; see our guide on checking a wallet address.

02The method is the tell

A fraudulent seller has one non-negotiable requirement: the money must not come back. That constraint is visible from the outside, and it is far harder to disguise than a website or a profile.

• A card checkout that mysteriously fails, followed by an offer to take a bank transfer instead.
• A discount for paying by transfer, crypto or gift card, framed as avoiding “card fees”.
• A request to send a peer-to-peer payment as “friends and family”, or to describe a purchase as a gift. That setting exists to remove purchase protection.
• A request to pay an individual's name for a business transaction.
• Any pressure to complete the payment before you have finished checking. Urgency and irreversibility travel together, because both remove your ability to reconsider.

One of these is enough to stop and check. There is no legitimate transaction that is harmed by being paid a disputable way.

03Check the handle, not the display name

On most payment apps the display name is free text the account holder controls, and can be changed in seconds — including to a business name, or to something that looks like a verification badge. The handle or account identifier is the account.

• Write down the exact handle, including punctuation and capitalisation, before you send anything, and screenshot the confirmation screen.
• Search that exact handle. A handle used across unrelated “shops” is one operation.
• Note whether the account was recently created or recently renamed where the app shows it.
• Be wary of a display name matching a business while the handle looks like an unrelated personal account.

Keep that screenshot regardless of how the transaction goes. If you do need to report it, the exact handle and the timestamp are the details that make a report usable to anybody else, and the account may be renamed or deleted within days.

04Never move money on someone else's behalf

A whole family of scams works by having you accept a payment and pass part of it on. It is worth recognising as a category, because the request always arrives with a reason that sounds administrative rather than suspicious.

• The overpayment: a buyer sends more than the price and asks you to return the difference. Their original payment is later reversed as fraudulent; the difference you sent was real.
• The wrong-amount refund: a claim that a refund was processed twice, with a request to send one back.
• The favour: a payment routed through your account because theirs is “locked”, with a cut for helping.
• The job: a role processing payments or buying gift cards with company money.

The pattern to hold onto is that a payment arriving in your account is not the same as the money being yours, and the reversal can arrive weeks later. Passing money on for a stranger also risks a lot more than the amount involved.

05Check the handle against community reports

Payment identifiers are the most durable thing a scam operation has. Websites are rebuilt and numbers are burned weekly, but a payment account is where the money actually lands, and replacing one costs the operator real effort.

That makes a payment handle the identifier most worth checking, and the one most worth reporting afterwards. A handle on its second storefront is often already on file even though the site is a week old.