> I've purchased specialized woodworking tools online that simply involved filling out a form. I later received the parts with an invoice to send payment. You can simply not pay if you choose not to.
Payment after receipt is very common in Switzerland, but fraud is presumably rare. Your name would probably go on the debtors register and that's the sort of bad credit history you don't want to have. At some point the police/debt collection is involved, they get sent to whatever the address is and so on. For the average person it's not worth burning your name and address for a free spokeshave.
You see delayed payment everywhere in b2b - "net-30" for example.
There was a story posted on HN once about a business saving money by prepaying. Some guy was working for a restaurant and saved 70% (yes, over two thirds) on their meat by, instead of ordering each day and settling on net-30 as they had been doing and as is typical, calling up their meat vendor and committing to a certain minimum order every day and paying for it right then. Because cash flow is that important to some businesses. The vendor said they'd never had a customer so good before, and yet it wasn't such a big deal for the restaurant. (Yes, they tend to run on thin margins, well, now their margins are a little bit fatter and they can afford to have mispredicted their meat usage a little, and still come out ahead).
It's the same as Hetzner vs AWS. You buy AWS, you can ramp up and down your bill any time, but you're overpaying by a huge multiple (can even be 10x-100x). If you get your servers from any traditional provider that's updated their price in the last five years, they'll bill you monthly for your server, and there's a setup cost of approximately one month, and you can't scale up without a week latency or down without two months, but you get the same amount of server for an incredibly low price (if you're accustomed to AWS) which - if you're not running a workload as bursty as Amazon on Christmas Day - lets you overprovision enough to more than make up for the inflexibility.
Payment after receipt is very common in Switzerland, but fraud is presumably rare. Your name would probably go on the debtors register and that's the sort of bad credit history you don't want to have. At some point the police/debt collection is involved, they get sent to whatever the address is and so on. For the average person it's not worth burning your name and address for a free spokeshave.