When you’re doing an electronic funds transfer (EFT), or supplying your bank details to someone for them to make an EFT payment into your account, please be particularly pedantic about the account number.

Because if your money lands up in someone else’s account, it’s entirely up to them whether they pay it back to you, or decide to keep their unexpected windfall.

Many consumers appear to believe that account details need to be an exact match for an EFT payment to be successful – in other words, that the name of the account holder, the branch code and the account number, all need to be correct.

This is sadly not the case – as long as the chosen bank has the account number entered, the transfer will go through.

And if the intended recipient develops selective morality and finds some way of justifying why they are entitled to keep the money, there is no way your bank can force them – also their customer – to give up the money, or go into their account and whip out the money. You are entirely at the mercy of that person.

I’m sure many do choose to do the right thing, but I only hear about the cases when they don’t.

In the most recent, a woman on maternity leave with her first child mistakenly gave an insurance company the number of the savings account she closed some years ago. As a result, the R7 500 pay-out from the “top up” insurance she’d taken out to pay the difference between her doctor’s bills and her medical aid payments landed up in the hands of the woman to whom the bank has since allocated that savings account number.

She initially said she’d spent some of the money, but would transfer the rest to the new mother, but that was weeks ago, and no money has been forthcoming.

When you’re paying one of your regular beneficiaries via EFT, make very sure that you’ve clicked on the right one – I once paid Truworths instead of Telkom! – and delete any which are no longer valid to cut down on your chances of making a mistake.

And if it’s a one-off payment, take time to triple check that you’ve got those numbers right.