Recently, sender SEPA banks have started to verify that the name the payer fills in the payment order, matches with that of the payee’s at the receiver bank.
When a mismatch is detected, the sending bank will warn the buyer about the issue, scaring them about losing the money without recurse if the transaction doesn’t turn out well.
This issue presented itself in mediation a few times already, and some of those trades had to be cancelled because either the buyer refused to send the money to a different name (as he has the right to do) or because the seller wasn’t able/willing to give his real name to the buyer.
The sender’s bank usually allows the payment to happen anyway, but with some sort of disclaimer in case the money is “lost”, and the risk that the buyer’s account be flagged or limited in some manner.
Where does Bisq stand about this?
The trading rules clearly state that traders have to create their in-app accounts using the real data of the fiat payment accounts they will use.
It has come to our attention, because of this recent change and the subsequent increase in mediation tickets, that several sellers had decided to either simplify the “Account holder name” field, for example from “John Fitzgerald Levitt Smith” to just “John Smith”, or to make it less revealing, for example “J. Smith” or “J. S.” or even sometimes “J.”.
This might have worked in the past, but now, in case trades have to be canceled for this reason, the seller, as the one liable for the event, will need to refund the buyer’s trade costs. Once a few weeks from this notice have passed, if requested by the buyer, there could be a penalty of up to the defined 20% for trade cancellation:
It is understandable that those sellers who have signed accounts which are a few years old, would lose their age if they had to re-create them from scratch in order to fill in the correct name, and this would cause quite a distress.
Signing works with the hash of the payment data, and it is not possible to let the users edit their “Account holder name” because if would change the account’s hash. Other than this, giving the ability to edit account details after signing would easily lead to subsidizing triangle scams.
A proposal made in the past to add a workaround was already discussed and rejected:
Sellers can still try to manually notify the buyers telling them to “please use John Fitzgerald Levitt Smith as payee’s name” as soon as the trade starts, but:
- they might not make it in time if they are the offer makers
- the buyer has the right to refuse, going by the trade rules
- the new name must be clearly the same person, so if there is a notable difference with what’s in the trade contract, the request would be invalid
In conclusion, the recommendation for those sellers who have their Bisq accounts configured with a name that doesn’t match what’s in their bank account, is to create a new account with the correct data.
While this would remove their account age, they can still do a self trade to self-sign themselves.