What a legitimate payment request looks like, line by line

Somewhere between agreeing to buy and actually paying, a message arrives asking you for money. It might be a link, a short set of instructions, a screenshot of a form. Whatever shape it takes, it is a document, and a document contains a fixed number of facts. Or it does not, which is the case worth spending five minutes on.

This is a description of the ordinary version rather than a fraud checklist. What a competent seller sends, item by item, because a competent seller has fielded these questions several thousand times and has stopped waiting to be asked them. Once you know the shape, a request missing half of it stands out without any effort at all.

Treat the request as a document, not a message

The reason people skim payment requests is structural. The request turns up inside a conversation, and conversation carries a social pull. A message asking for money reads like a reply to your last one, so it gets scanned at the speed of a reply rather than the speed of a contract. The friendlier the exchange has been, the faster the scan.

The fix is unglamorous. Read the request once, on its own, as text. If it is long, read it aloud. You are not looking for anything clever, only for whether the facts you would need in an argument six months from now are present in the message you are holding. They either are or they are not, and finding out takes about thirty seconds.

One honest limit before the list. A well-formed request does not prove the seller is good. Anyone can write a tidy message. What it does is rule out the sloppier and more improvised end of the market, which is where most of the losses actually happen. Rule-out is a smaller claim than proof, and considerably more useful. The wider version of this test is on our page about paying safely.

The eight items, and what each should say

Here is the whole checklist in one place. The middle column is what a working business writes. The right-hand column is what the same line looks like when somebody is improvising.

Assembled, the eight fit comfortably into one message. Roughly like this, which is close to what our own desk sends once a plan has been chosen:

Two screens, twelve months. Total $97 US dollars, one payment, nothing stored and nothing renewing itself. Card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal or cryptocurrency, same price on all five. The payment page is our processor and the trading name you will see there is the one that lands on your statement. Login details reach this chat inside about ten minutes of the payment clearing. Your subscription runs to 31 July 2027. Renewal next year is the published price on the pricing page, which is the same figure you are paying today.

There is nothing skilled about that paragraph. It is dull on purpose, and the dullness is the point: every sentence in it exists to close off a question that would otherwise be argued about later.

The figure: currency, conversion, and the exact number

The amount is the line everyone reads and almost nobody checks. Three things are worth half a second each.

First, does it match the quote exactly? Not approximately. A figure that grew between the conversation and the request has grown for a reason, and the reason is usually a charge introduced too late to be compared with anyone else. This is the entire argument for buying from somebody who publishes a price list in public: a number printed where strangers can see it cannot quietly become a different number in a private message.

Second, is the currency actually named? This site sells into six countries and four of them put a dollar sign in front of their money. A request reading ninety-seven dollars is not a complete instruction, and the gap between an American dollar and an Australian one is not small. We publish set local prices per country rather than converting on the fly, and the country breakdown lives on the country page.

Third, is anything going to be added by your own bank? If you pay in a currency your card was not issued in, many issuers apply a foreign transaction fee of roughly two to three percent. That is not the seller's charge and no seller can waive it, but it belongs in your arithmetic before you decide the total. A seller who mentions it unprompted is telling you they have had the conversation before.

The payee name, and where it turns up again

The name taking your money should appear in three places: on the payment page, on the confirmation you receive, and on your statement line. Ask for it in advance so that all three are recognisable when they arrive.

This sounds like paperwork fussiness until you picture the moment it pays off. It is eleven months later, you are scanning a statement, and a charge you do not recognise is sitting there from last summer. If you cannot place it, the natural move is to report it, which cancels a subscription you were happily using and costs the seller a fee and a dispute mark for a sale that was never in question. Knowing the descriptor in advance prevents a completely avoidable mess in both directions.

One nuance worth stating so it does not read as suspicious later: the name on a payment page is often the processing entity rather than the shop name you were talking to. That is normal and extremely common across online retail. What is not normal is nobody being willing to tell you, in advance, which name you will see. A one-line answer is the correct response to that question.

Ten seconds on the payment page itself

Once the page opens, five checks, none of which need any expertise:

• You reached it from the link the seller sent you, not from a message forwarded on by somebody else.
• The address starts with https and the domain matches what you were told it would be.
• The amount on the page is the amount you agreed, to the cent, in the currency you expected.
• Nothing on the form is quietly setting up a repeat charge, and no box has been pre-ticked to arrange one.
• The only things being asked for are payment details and a way to contact you. Nothing about a television subscription requires an identity document, a date of birth, or access to your device.

Worth saying plainly: there is no checkout on this website. Not a missing feature, a decision. Ordering happens in a chat, the total gets agreed in writing there, and the payment page opens afterwards. The mechanics of that are set out on how to pay for IPTV, and the side effect is that you finish the purchase holding a written record of everything that was promised, sitting on your own phone.

The end date, written down before you pay

Of the eight items, this is the one most often absent and the one that generates the most argument. A yearly subscription has a date on which it stops. That date should be in the request, in words, before any money moves.

The reason it matters more here than in most purchases is that nothing renews automatically. There is no card on file, so no charge appears to tell you the year is up. The expiry date is the only mechanism you have, which makes it your responsibility, and a decent seller helps by writing it down rather than leaving you to count. What arrives in the minutes after paying, including the date itself, is covered in what happens after you pay.

There is a second reason, less obvious. An undated year is a year whose start point can be argued about afterwards. Did it begin when you paid, when the login was issued, or when you first opened the app in the room where the television lives? Those can be a fortnight apart. Fix the date at the start and there is nothing to disagree about later.

Four requests that fail on sight

Four patterns are worth refusing outright rather than negotiating with.

1. A request that arrives before a total was agreed. The order of operations is not decorative. Agreeing the figure first is what makes the figure checkable, and a link that appears before it is a link asking you to accept a number you never saw.
2. A request whose only route cannot be undone. A final method offered among others is ordinary. A final method as the only option is a decision about your recourse, made by somebody else, and that decision is worth reading.
3. A second request after a completed payment. A release charge, a verification deposit, a fee to switch the account on. Nothing in a subscription needs topping up before it will start, and the second ask is the moment the first one stops resembling a sale.
4. A request for information a television service has no use for. Card digits inside the chat, a photograph of you holding the card, a scan of a passport, remote access to your device. None of these belong anywhere near an order for streaming channels.

What ours says, and where the numbers come from

Our own request follows the eight items because it is easier than answering the same questions individually. The figures are $69 for one screen, $97 for two and $137 for three, each covering twelve months. That works out at about $5.75 a month at the entry plan, though you pay it once rather than monthly.

Five routes, one price on all of them, no surcharge for choosing the protected ones. No card is kept on file, which is less a policy than a description of the plumbing: on card, wallet and PayPal payments the number goes to a payment company and never reaches us at all. Nothing renews itself, so ignoring us next July simply ends the subscription.

Everything above is checkable before you commit anything. The price list is public, the refund terms are on their own page rather than quoted per customer, and if a line in a request from us is unclear, the fastest fix is to ask on the contact page and get it in writing. A seller who cannot put an answer in writing has told you what the answer is.