Latvian scam?

[undyingking]

While I was away we had an inquiry from a person in Latvia who wanted to buy a game. He asked for our bank details so he could BACS the money across to us directly. My esteemed business partner, who was looking after this sort of thing in my absence, responded by asking why he couldn't use a credit / debit card / Paypal like everyone else? We've not heard back from that yet...

Maybe I'm being paranoid, but this screamed "SCAM!" to me. Not sure exactly what use our bank details would be to a scammer, though? After all we have the bank details of all our authors / affiliates etc, so we can BACS them their royalties and whatever, and I've not yet thought of a way to use that information to fleece them?

Comments

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

I have had trouble in the past with people using my company's bank details -- which are fairly public as a lot of our customers pay us by BACS -- to set up dodgy direct debits. Rather bizarrely they appear not to have actually given the organisations concerned any useful details (at least, they had given a nonexistent name/address to the only organisation who provided that to the bank when the bank requested it) so I can only imagine they were trying to cause money rather than actually scam us in any useful way. In any case I watch that account carefully and flagged the direct debits as dodgy straight away to the bank; I now have a note on the account that no direct debits are to be set up on that account without my explicit written instructions, which appears to have solved the problem.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

"cause trouble" rather than "cause money", I mean.