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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

In UK you can write a handwritten latter: please transfer £100K to a spesific bank account" and fax it to the bank, they will do it

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That’s definitely not true. Every bank interaction is verified with 2FA. They had these cool personal small PIN devices that you inserted your card into, which generates a OTP that you read over the phone.

It’s mostly just app-based now, but they still exist.

https://images.app.goo.gl/BJ6CGR4foeQhRmhw8

I think the GP was invoking the fact that a cheque can be written on anything in the UK (though not true anymore for all banks I think) - see https://www.theregister.com/2010/04/09/plywood_cheque/ .

Not sure if you can fax those cheques though.

I've literally done it a few weeks ago.

You can authorise a BACS transfer on a business bank acccount with a fax if you use Natwest

Ahh, it’s a business account and not a personal one.

Even so, it doesn’t add up. You’re saying anyone can just fax transfer orders to your bank if they know your account number without including any authentication information of any type? And you’re OK with this?

fwiw, it probably depends on the bank and the customer. I used to work for a large insurance company in London. There I could (and did) authorise 6 digit transfers to new accounts with just a fax with the (perpetually busy) directors signature. One time the bank made a mistake, and one simple phonecall from me was all it took to resolve (with no verification of who I was - unless they did some callerid check?). The level of customer service was astonishing to me, but that account was probably worth it to the bank to eat any fraud until it got too serious.

Signature has to match and they do call you to confirm, but your are right that there is no cryptograpgic security, its all judgement call by meat

Well the call back to confirm is an appropriate layer of security (2fa?) I guess. So a more accurate version of the original comment might be “some business accounts can fax requests to their bank, which they then confirm via telephone before doing it”

In Germany too, but your signature needs to match the one on file for verification.

In US and Canada you should be able to do a similar thing by printing your own cheque. Which doesn’t have a standard. It just requires you to have all of the information that you see on the cheque itself.

In France too, officially. The law dictates what a cheque is and it can be a piece of paper with some specific info.

In reality nobody will accept these.

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