Well, I recently sold a bunch of parts to a guy in Austria that I have sold to before. Payment has usually been fine but this time I am missing £50. This the guy has admitted to and has said twice that he would pay me using PayPal. This was a few days ago and so far nothing and none of my emails have been answered. He has been active on other forums in that time so I can only assume that he has seen my emails.

Any suggestions from the floor?

No money, no postie goods. Or have you posted before getting confirmed payment?

have you posted the parts?

Yes, posted and arrived. £50 missing from what should have been £1425. So £1375 received.

paypal fee's?

or some strange exchange rate thing between pound and euro?

did you agree the price in pounds or euros?

Agreed in pounds. I lost some due to the exchange rate which has been accounted for. No PayPal fees money was sent by IBAN. I am definately missing £50. This has been agreed by the buyer who has said they would pay up and so far they have not, emails not being answered etc.

If you paid using IBAN this would imply the payment was sent over SWIFT. The deduction is possibly charges incurred at both ends – the remitter should set the charging flag to "our" which means he pays both sets at his end.

The other options are "ben" which means you pay them as they're deducted from the payment, or "sha" meaning they're shared and you only pay those charges incurred at your bank.

EDIT – was it exactly £50, and the payment was made in GBP? If so, that seems reasonable as any FX deduction would unlikely be a round number,

There were no fees. The amount paid in Euros translates to exactly the amount paid into my bank account using the exchange rate my bank used when the money arrived.

I promise you, I am owed £50 by this guy.

OK, just asking. I do a lot of currency payments so see things like this all the time, but it's not really a case of non-payment as it's interbank.

Unfortunately when you add in the increased cost of chasing an international debt, there has to come a point where you write it off. Short of email/Skype chasing with a threat of badmouthing on wherever you transacted, I don't think there's much you can do that can be done for less than the shortfall you have incurred.

I suspect that you are right. I had thought of calling the police local to where he lives and seeing what they had to say but I can't really see how that would help other than making me feel better.

Not disputing that you are £50 light but that's a strange 'theft' – I can't imagine the thought whereby you pay ~96% or whatever the percentage is and deduct a liitle bit. Why wouldn't you either pay the full amount or pay nothing. Very odd

As richcc said + as it's only been a few days I think it's a bit premature to contact local police. Could be an email problem or simply that he misread a 3 for an 8 or something like that. Any phone number available ?

So to re-cap.
He sent you less money than you were wanting via IBAN.
He has acknowledged this via email & agreed to send you the missing 50GBP via paypal which he has not yet done.
Now he is ignoring your emails.

Is that all correct?

As a side note, as an expat I am used to making €>GBP IBAN payments & would find it hard to calculate how to be 50GBP short on a transfer…

Marge, you are correct.

I've also contacted him via another forum which he has been active on.

No phone number. I have an email address, bank account details and what I presume is a home address.

The shortfall is nothing to do with the transfer. It has been calculated and admintted that it was not transferred in the first place.

Thanks folks!

In fact he was last active on the other forum I use 4hours ago so would have received the message I sent him.

The cost of trying to recover the outstanding £50 is prohibitively expensive. That would be the case whether the debtor lived in Austria or Aberdeen, or round the corner from you for that matter.

Use the usual online channels to raise a complaint and discredit his online credit-worthiness and write off the £50. Very annoying, but not much you can do.

Play a straight bat, just in case there has been a genuine error on his part, and his non-responsiveness is for a good and honest reason.

This is my current plan. I will leave it a few days and then email him again before I start down the naming and shaming route.

Did you post the goods before he paid ?

If hes been honest before and he's sent £1370.

I would imagine he simply doesn't have the last £50 at the moment and is probably a bit embarrassed to admit it.

Therefore he's pretending to ignore emails and will pay next month?

why the hell did you post something of that value before being paid anyway 😕 There's a lesson in there.

I'd sold to him before and all was fine plus I had proof of the transfer. I just didn't do the 'sums' until it was too late.

The payment arrived this morning. Hoorah!

Cheers Folks.

Dan