It's not safe to give out your bank account number since it allows people to withdraw money.
But if it's so easy, what's the easy process? i.e. is it even legal (assuming you have permission)?
And if it's legal, then how would you go about withdrawing the money given just the relevant information (account/routing numbers, name of the account owner, etc.)?
For what it's worth:
I would assume that forging a check using the account information to include is illegal, so I'm obviously not asking how to forge checks (or for any other illegal advice); I'm only asking how to go about legally withdrawing money (assuming you have permission or whatever else is necessary at minimum)
If it's only legal for an account owned by myself, then I would like to know how I would go about doing this for my own account (i.e., if there's a legal way to do it assuming I have relevant authorization -- either because I'm the owner or the owner has given me permission -- then I'm looking for an explanation of how this is done, not just an answer saying "it's possible")
I can't find any option on my banks' websites' that lets me withdraw money from someone else's account, so this doesn't seem to be supported? (yes I know this sounds silly, my point is that it doesn't look anything close to easy to me)
Websites like this say this can be done with the account number, but not how
I don't find any option on ATMs saying "please enter the account number of the third-party account you'd like to withdraw from", for obvious reasons
But I just can't think of any other way to make this work. Does a bank do this for me if I go in person? Or by phone? Or is there an obscure option on their websites for doing this?