Verify CBE transaction receipts
Paste a Commercial Bank of Ethiopia receipt link or transaction reference. links.et fetches the receipt from apps.cbe.com.et and shows you what the bank actually recorded: amount, sender, receiver, reference and time.
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What you can paste for CBE
- Reference plus the account suffix
- FT00FAKE000012345678
- The twelve-character FT reference with the last eight digits of the account number appended. Twenty characters in total.
- A mobile-banking short link
- https://mbreciept.cbe.com.et/FT00FAKE0000-12345678
- The newer v2 short link
- v2-hfFAKEtokenFAKE00
Where to find it. The CBE SMS gives the FT reference. The eight-digit suffix is the last eight digits of the account the money moved on. CBE Mobile shares a link that already contains both.
The thing that catches people out
CBE is the one provider that needs two pieces. A bare FT reference with no account suffix cannot resolve, because the bank uses the suffix to pick which receipt it is. If a customer sends only the FT code, ask for the last eight digits of their account number as well.
How to check a CBE payment before you hand over goods
- 1.Get the reference, not a screenshotAsk for the reference plus the account suffix. The CBE SMS gives the FT reference. The eight-digit suffix is the last eight digits of the account the money moved on. CBE Mobile shares a link that already contains both. A screenshot is a picture of a claim; the reference is the thing Commercial Bank of Ethiopia can confirm.
- 2.Look it upPaste it in, or send it to the API from your own system. links.et fetches the receipt from apps.cbe.com.et, which is Commercial Bank of Ethiopia's own receipt service.
- 3.Check the amount and the receiverCompare both against your own record. A CBE receipt that resolves but pays a different account is the most common real fraud, and it is easy to miss when you only read the status line.
- 4.Check it is not a repeatConfirm the reference is not one you have already accepted. A genuine CBE receipt shown to two sellers verifies for both of them, and nothing on the receipt itself says it has been spent.
Questions about CBE
How do I verify a CBE transaction?
Take the reference plus the account suffix from the CBE receipt and paste it into links.et. It fetches the receipt from apps.cbe.com.et, which is Commercial Bank of Ethiopia's own receipt service, and returns the amount, sender, receiver, reference and timestamp exactly as the bank recorded them. The CBE SMS gives the FT reference. The eight-digit suffix is the last eight digits of the account the money moved on. CBE Mobile shares a link that already contains both.
What does a CBE transaction reference look like?
CBE accepts 3 kinds of input: reference plus the account suffix (The twelve-character FT reference with the last eight digits of the account number appended. Twenty characters in total), a mobile-banking short link, the newer v2 short link. An example of the first shape is FT00FAKE000012345678, which is invented rather than a real reference.
Can a CBE payment screenshot be faked?
Yes. Any screenshot can be edited, and edited CBE screenshots are common enough that a picture should never be treated as proof on its own. What cannot be edited is the receipt Commercial Bank of Ethiopia publishes at apps.cbe.com.et. links.et goes and reads that, so the amount you see is the bank's, not the image's.
Why did my CBE lookup come back empty?
CBE is the one provider that needs two pieces. A bare FT reference with no account suffix cannot resolve, because the bank uses the suffix to pick which receipt it is. If a customer sends only the FT code, ask for the last eight digits of their account number as well.
Is CBE verification down?
links.et probes apps.cbe.com.et every few minutes from inside Ethiopia and publishes the result at https://links.et/status/cbe-json, with the history behind it. If that page shows an outage, the bank's receipt service is unreachable and no verification tool can read it, including this one. Payments made during an outage still verify normally once it clears.