Interact ETransfer Simplified – You Could Save $1,000’s

Interact Etransfer Simplified

Interact Etransfer’s seem to be one of the easiest ways to transfer money from one person to the other. They also are free to do. Got to love them.

For us personally we use them to buy stuff of kijii, our private investment payment gets deposited every month with this method. Friends go to the beer store and ask if we need anything, if I do a simple e-transfer will pay them back in no time.

Most people don’t carry cash (well not much) anymore and exact change is basically non existent. I’m a huge fan of them because I hate owing anyone any cash.

I think all the major banks now allow you to do them and they are super easy to do. All you have to do is log into your bank account and go to send interac etransfer from there you enter the recipients email address and the money you want to send, create a password and send it.

The recipient will then get a email notifying them that they got a e-transfer waiting for them to deposit it. They just need to click on what bank they want to deposit it into, sign in and input the password they agreed to use.

Unfortunately this is where problems can happen.

I was reading a article this morning on msn about some guy who lost thousands sending money to his contractor and his contractor not receiving it. You can read that article here.

I’ll tell you right now he’s not the only one this happened too. It happened to us as well. Not in our personal account but in our business account.

As some of you may know I’m a landscaper by trade and work with my dad and 2-3 other guys. A lot of our clients don’t want to pay by cheque anymore. (while some swear by it) As a business owner cheques aren’t really that good anyways the system is slow. I don’t know when the client sent the mail and mail sometimes gets lost at the post office etc etc. It’s a timely process. Etransfers are instant, Bam the money is in the account. It’s the best way to go.

But….

We have lost 2 payments from clients in the last year via E-transfers. In total about 4,000 bucks that we had to eat out of our pocket and damaged the relationship with the client slightly. Nothing major but they question the security of our email account.

The first time it happened the client sent a transfer for about 800 bucks and followed up the e-transfer with a email with the password to deposit it. Both emails we didn’t even receive. This one escalated quite a bit. The client called us the next day and said someone from our email account was trying to access his account but their bank caught it and blocked the guy. (This client was a multi millionaire and this could of been insane) The bank looked into the situation and found out it was some person from India and there was nothing they could do. The money was lost.

How did It Happen?

We talked to some investigators and they mentioned that these guys love to target small businesses and hack their email. They will forward all emails that contain the word e-transfer and you wont even see it. They then deposit the money quickly if they know the password. (Easy since the client sent the password in the next email with the subject line e-transfer password)

This was a wake up call and after analyzing the email we saw the forwarded addy stuff and removed it and changed passwords etc. For about half a year everything was fine, we thought we figured it out.

Then in the spring this year a different client did the same thing e-transferred about 3,000 plus to us and followed it up yet again with a password. We didn’t receive it, after awhile we asked the client to pay us and he showed us records of the e-transfer and deposit. This one hurt, it happened yet again…. After that we opted for the gambit of security from our web host and knock on wood it hasn’t happened again.

There is no way to get any of that money back, its gone.

Do This

A couple months ago I e-transferred a buddy and didn’t have to put in a password in or anything. I was blown away, he had setup auto e-transfer deposit. I didn’t even know that was a thing. Sure enough I looked into it and saw I could setup both our personal account and business account to accept automatic e-transfers. It was sooo easy to do and now we just get a email saying person x deposited x dollars into your account.

I don’t think there is a way for hackers to bypass this from a ordinary email anymore. No more passwords, no more logging in to deposit that money. Just instant money.

Conclusion

I share this story hopefully to help everyone. Unfortunately we lost a couple grand in the process, but the banks didn’t use to offer this. Clearly this is the safer and simpler way to accept etransfers, I encourage you all to take 5 minutes out of your day and set this up -Interact Etransfer Simplified

The money sure would of been better in our dividend portfolio versus some hacker across the world.

While losing $4,000 hurts, it could of been a lot worse.

cheers!

Rob

Hey I’m Rob, creator of Passive Canadian Income.

In 2011 me and my wife had almost $60,000 in debt and a negative $7,000 Net Worth. Through hard work and financial education we paid all that off. Now we are focusing on increasing our Passive Income Streams to make the money work for us. Feel Free to Follow along the Journey by clicking the Social Media links below or subscribing to get notified of new posts on the sidebar.