As cost-of-living pressures continue to climb, people are looking for creative ways to save. One method gaining popularity on social media is called "cash stuffing". It's a reinvention of the old envelope system our grandparents used to use, and it's bringing back the use of physical cash.
But the general premise of “No, you can’t autodebit” or “Sure, I’ll let you think you can auto-debit. Doesn’t mean I’ll have it turned on at that moment” still holds.
That doesn’t hold in Australia. I’ve never heard of a bank here that allows you to (easily) stop someone from taking money out of your account. In fact, even if the account is empty they might be able to overdraw it if they have the right level of merchant account (I had that happen once, when I booked a flight that was about to depart, and they messed up/failed to charge me for the flight. Three months later someone noticed and my account was charged/overdrawn).
As someone who runs a business that charges customers money all day every day… if I have the customer’s details then I can charge their account whatever I want. Sure, I could go to jail (or be sent out of business) if I do the wrong thing… but there isn’t really much protection below that point and if I’m only mildly scummy, I’d probably get away with it.
Here, those charges normally hit our debit cards - not the account itself in the sense that a direct debit skips the card and basically functions like a check/cheque.
Nothing on the card, it declines, they can’t charge.
We used to use EFT with our ancient transfer system, still do for direct deposit payroll and such, but otherwise it’s all cards here. Very few people use account transfers. so none of that is a risk here. It takes two or three business days, and the merchant has zero visibility into whether or not the transaction will actually approve at the time they make the sale. Online merchants wouldn’t send items without cleared payment, but very few even use those transfers anymore because there’s just no information on whether the customer actually has the money or not.
In the airline example, they never would have gotten their money unless they were ok with making a very big problem out of it - most companies wouldn’t, and most companies would not pursue someone who owed them some nominal amount.
Credit cards don’t work like that here, they approve whether you want them to or not unless they’re locked, but debit cards lend themselves to sequestering money like that in multiple accts.
That doesn’t hold in Australia. I’ve never heard of a bank here that allows you to (easily) stop someone from taking money out of your account. In fact, even if the account is empty they might be able to overdraw it if they have the right level of merchant account (I had that happen once, when I booked a flight that was about to depart, and they messed up/failed to charge me for the flight. Three months later someone noticed and my account was charged/overdrawn).
As someone who runs a business that charges customers money all day every day… if I have the customer’s details then I can charge their account whatever I want. Sure, I could go to jail (or be sent out of business) if I do the wrong thing… but there isn’t really much protection below that point and if I’m only mildly scummy, I’d probably get away with it.
Here, those charges normally hit our debit cards - not the account itself in the sense that a direct debit skips the card and basically functions like a check/cheque.
Nothing on the card, it declines, they can’t charge.
We used to use EFT with our ancient transfer system, still do for direct deposit payroll and such, but otherwise it’s all cards here. Very few people use account transfers. so none of that is a risk here. It takes two or three business days, and the merchant has zero visibility into whether or not the transaction will actually approve at the time they make the sale. Online merchants wouldn’t send items without cleared payment, but very few even use those transfers anymore because there’s just no information on whether the customer actually has the money or not.
In the airline example, they never would have gotten their money unless they were ok with making a very big problem out of it - most companies wouldn’t, and most companies would not pursue someone who owed them some nominal amount.
Credit cards don’t work like that here, they approve whether you want them to or not unless they’re locked, but debit cards lend themselves to sequestering money like that in multiple accts.