DEV Community: cheki

How to Check a Bank Receipt Online in Ethiopia (CBE, Telebirr, BOA, Dashen, Awash and More)

cheki — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 05:15:29 +0000

"I've sent it." Then a screenshot arrives.

To know the money is real, you have to ask the bank. The good news: every Ethiopian bank and wallet publishes each receipt on a public web page, with no login needed. The annoying part: every bank wants something slightly different to find it.

This guide is the cheat sheet. For each bank: what to ask the sender for, and the one mistake that trips people up. (All examples are made up.)

The short version

Ask for the QR code or the receipt link, not a screenshot and not just a number. The QR and the link carry everything the bank needs. A bare reference number often isn't enough, because several banks also want the last digits of an account, and that's where most failed checks come from.

Bank	Best thing to ask for	If you only have a number
CBE	Receipt link or QR	FT reference plus last 8 digits of the receiving account
Telebirr	SMS link or QR	10-character transaction number works alone
Bank of Abyssinia	Slip link or QR	Reference plus last 5 digits of the account
Dashen	FT Ref	The 16-character FT Ref works alone
Awash	The full share link	Can't be rebuilt from a number
CBE Birr	Receipt link or QR	Receipt number plus the payer's phone
M-Pesa	Transaction number	Works alone
eBirr / Siinqee	The full link	Can't be rebuilt from a number
ZamZam	The receipt link	The number at the end of the link, not the printed reference

Then, whatever the bank, check three things: the amount, the receiver, and the date. A real receipt to someone else's account is still not your money. And keep a list of references you've accepted, because a real receipt shown twice passes every other check.

CBE (Commercial Bank of Ethiopia)

Ask for: the receipt link from the CBE app, or its QR.

New receipts come as a link like https://mbreciept.cbe.com.et/fHCxExampleRcpt01. That ending is the Receipt ID, and it's all CBE needs. (Yes, CBE spells it "reciept".)

Watch out: older receipts only show an FT reference, like FT26SAMPLE01. Those need the last 8 digits of the receiving account too, and they go through CBE's older receipt service, which often doesn't answer. If an FT check stalls, ask for the link from the app instead.

Telebirr

Ask for: the link in the SMS, the QR, or the transaction number.

The number is 10 letters and digits, starting with a short prefix like DET, CHQ, DAB, DEL or ADQ (for example DET0SAMPLE). The receipt lives at https://transactioninfo.ethiotelecom.et/receipt/ plus that number.

Watch out: Telebirr's page only opens on Ethiopian networks. On your phone with Ethiopian data it's fine. Abroad or on a VPN it won't load. That's why cheki.et, hosted outside Ethiopia, hands Telebirr checks to your phone's browser with a one-tap button.

Bank of Abyssinia (BOA)

Ask for: the slip link or the QR.

A BOA link looks like https://cs.bankofabyssinia.com/slip/?trx=FT26SAMPLE0712345: the reference (FT26SAMPLE07) with five account digits (12345) glued on the end. BOA needs both, which is why the link or QR beats typing.

Watch out: if the receiving account's digits aren't found, try the last 5 digits of the account the money came from. BOA files some receipts that way. Transfers from BOA to other banks carry an encrypted QR. cheki.et decodes it and then asks BOA to confirm. If BOA can't be reached, the result says "decoded only", which is not verified. QRs can be copied, so don't hand over goods on that.

Dashen Bank

Ask for: the FT Ref.

It's 16 characters, like B22WDTI00SAMPLE1. It works on its own, with no account number.

Watch out: Dashen receipts also show a longer "Transaction Ref". That one won't find anything. If a Dashen check says "not found", this is almost always why.

Awash Bank

Ask for: the whole link from the Awash SMS or app, copied rather than retyped.

It looks like https://awashpay.awashbank.com:8225/-2SAMPLE0X1-4U0000. Both parts after the dashes matter, and you can't rebuild the link from the transaction number alone.

Watch out: one mistyped character and the check fails. Copy and paste.

CBE Birr

Ask for: the receipt link or QR. Failing that, the receipt number (TID) and the payer's phone number.

CBE Birr is CBE's mobile wallet, separate from the CBE banking app. The TID is 10 or 11 characters, like DTS41AB2C90.

Watch out: it needs the payer's phone, not yours. An empty result usually means the number and phone don't match. On cheki.et this bank is in beta: confirmed on real wallet and bank transfers, not yet on merchant, airtime or bill payments.

M-Pesa Ethiopia

Ask for: the transaction number from the M-Pesa SMS (usually two letters and six or more digits, like SE12345678).

Watch out: like Telebirr, it only answers on Ethiopian networks. It's in beta on cheki.et, as it hasn't been confirmed on a real receipt yet. If you have one that fails, a report helps.

eBirr and Siinqee Bank

Ask for: the full receipt link, like receipt.ebirr.com/nib/abc123def.

The first part after the slash names the institution. Siinqee uses the same platform under receipt.ebirr.com/siinqee/…. Support for other eBirr partner banks (Nib, Wegagen, Ahadu, KAAFI) is still in development on cheki.

ZamZam Bank

Ask for: the receipt link, like https://receipt.zamzambank.com.et/receipt/12345678.

Watch out: the 8-digit number at the end of the link is what finds the receipt, not the reference printed on it. That mix-up causes most failed ZamZam checks. Beta on cheki.et.

Not on the list yet?

cheki.et has 10 banks and wallets live today. Zemen, Nib, Wegagen, Ahadu, KAAFI and others are on the banks page as in development. Each goes live once a real receipt confirms it. Until then, use the bank's own receipt page or check your balance. For every bank's receipt address in one place, see Ethiopian bank receipt formats.

"Not found" doesn't always mean fake

Most failed checks are real payments checked with the wrong piece of information. Before you call it fake, run through this:

Bank	Usual mix-up
CBE	FT reference without the account digits. Ask for the link.
Telebirr	A tight crop cut off the last character. It should be 10.
BOA	Wrong 5 digits. Try the sender's account.
Dashen	The long Transaction Ref instead of the 16-character FT Ref.
Awash	A retyped link with a typo.
CBE Birr	Your phone instead of the payer's.
ZamZam	The printed reference instead of the link's number.

Still not found with the right information? Treat it as unpaid until the money shows up in your account.

Skip the cheat sheet

Remembering ten banks' quirks is a lot. A checker does it for you. On cheki.et, scan the receipt's QR with your phone camera or paste the link, and it works out the bank, asks it, and shows what the bank has on record. It only shows green when the bank itself confirmed. A decoded QR or a bank that didn't answer never counts.

Other checkers, like check.et, verify.et and Veritas, read the same public pages, so the tips above apply whichever you use.

Why cheki is free, and why that matters

The banks publish every receipt for free, yet checking them is often sold back to businesses as monthly plans and per-check fees. cheki started from a simple idea: you shouldn't pay to read a page your own bank already made public.

So it's open source under the MIT license, with no signup, no key and no database. The website, the API, every bank's parser and SDKs for five languages live in one public repo at github.com/1RB/cheki.

That openness keeps it working. Banks change their receipt pages without warning, and the people who notice first are the shops and developers using them. With the code public, whoever spots a break can fix it, and anyone can add a missing bank with the add-a-bank guide. Got a real receipt that fails? Open an issue with personal details removed.

cheki isn't affiliated with any bank or Ethio Telecom.

How to Tell if a CBE or Telebirr Payment Screenshot Is Fake

cheki — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 05:08:43 +0000

A customer holds up their phone. Green tick, "Transfer successful", 5,000 birr. There's a queue behind them and they're in a hurry.

Do you hand over the goods?

Here's the rule to remember: a screenshot is a claim. The bank's record is the proof. Everything below is about getting to that proof in under a minute, while the customer waits.

Fakes are easy to make

Type "fake cbe" into Google and autocomplete suggests "fake cbe screenshot template". Type "fake telebirr" and you get "fake telebirr app for android". Whole tools exist to draw a convincing success screen without any money moving.

Most fake payments are one of five kinds:

Edited. A real 500 birr receipt becomes 5,000, or last week's date becomes today.
Reused. A real receipt, already used once, comes back for a new order.
Misdirected. The money really moved, just not to you.
Invented. A fake app draws a receipt for a payment that never happened.
Fake SMS. A message that looks like it's from the bank or 127, with a made-up number.

Staring harder at the picture only catches the sloppy ones. Three habits catch all five.

The three habits: scan it, match it, log it

1. Scan it

Don't judge the picture. Ask the bank.

Every Ethiopian bank and wallet publishes each receipt on its own public web page. You just need the receipt's QR code or its link. Both carry everything the bank needs to find it.

A bare transaction number often isn't enough. For some banks, like Bank of Abyssinia and older CBE receipts, the bank also wants the last few digits of an account number, and a customer at the counter rarely has those handy. So ask for the QR or the link first.

The quickest way: open cheki.et on your phone and scan the receipt's QR with the camera. It asks the bank and shows you the amount, sender, receiver and date the bank has on record. Green means the bank confirmed it. Anything else, whether amber or an error, means not yet.

Prefer to do it by hand? That works too:

CBE: the app shares a link starting with https://mbreciept.cbe.com.et/. (Yes, the bank spells it "reciept".)
Telebirr: the SMS links to https://transactioninfo.ethiotelecom.et/receipt/ followed by a 10-character number like DET0SAMPLE.

Two cautions. Check the web address is exactly the bank's, not a lookalike. And Telebirr's page only opens on Ethiopian networks, so use mobile data or local Wi-Fi with any VPN off. (That's also why cheki.et, hosted abroad, gives you a one-tap button to Telebirr's own page instead of checking it on its server.)

Or skip all of it: if the money came to you, open your own app or dial *127# (Telebirr) or *889# (CBE). If it's in your balance, it's real. That just gets hard at a busy counter, with five payments of 300 birr in ten minutes.

2. Match it

A real receipt only proves a payment happened. Make sure it's your payment. Check three things:

Amount: the full amount, not "close enough".
Receiver: your name and the last digits of your account or phone. This catches kind 3.
Date: today, around when they say they paid.

3. Log it

The hardest fake is a real receipt shown twice, because every other check passes. The fix is boring and it works: write down every reference you accept, in a notebook, a spreadsheet or your POS. Seen it before? Say no.

This matters most when several people work the counter. The same receipt can visit one cashier in the morning and another after lunch.

Warning signs

None of these prove a fake, but each is a reason to slow down and scan:

The crop cuts off the transaction number or the receiver's name.
They'll send a picture but not the link or QR.
The amount's font, spacing or alignment looks slightly off.
The phone's clock doesn't fit the time on the receipt.
It's a photo of another screen, or forwarded many times.
"It's processing, I'm late, just let me go." Pressure is a tactic. A real payment checks in seconds.
An SMS "from 127". Sender names can be faked. Treat it as a pointer, not proof.

One more: a QR on its own proves nothing either. Anyone can make a QR that holds a transaction number. Its value is that it gets you to the bank's answer faster.

If the check fails

The bank has no record: don't hand anything over. Ask for the link again. A tight crop often drops the last character of a Telebirr number. Still nothing? Treat it as unpaid.
The bank isn't answering: banks go down sometimes. Wait, retry, or check your balance. A slow check is never a reason to accept the picture.
The receiver isn't you: then it isn't your payment, however real it is.

There's a longer list of tricks, with examples, in the guide to payment fraud in Ethiopia.

The sticky note

Print this for the counter:

Scan it. Match it. Log it.

Scan the QR or open the link, never just the screenshot.

Amount, receiver, date: all three must match.

Write the reference down. Seen it before? No.

No answer from the bank? No goods yet.

Which checker?

Any tool that asks the bank works. cheki.et, check.et, verify.et, Veritas and others all read the same public bank pages, and the bank's own page is always free. Pick one that shows you the bank's source link, so you can open it yourself, and that never shows green unless the bank confirmed.

On privacy, cheki.et has no accounts and no database. A confirmed receipt sits in server memory for up to six hours so a repeat check doesn't hit the bank again. Failed checks aren't kept.

Why cheki is free, and why that matters

A small shop can lose a week's profit to one fake screenshot. The banks already publish every receipt for free, yet checking them is often sold back to businesses as monthly plans and per-check fees. cheki started from a simple idea: you shouldn't pay to read a page your own bank already made public.

So it's open source under the MIT license, with no signup and no key. The website, the API, every bank's parser and SDKs for five languages live in one public repo at github.com/1RB/cheki.

That openness is practical, not just principled. Banks change their receipt pages without warning, and the first people to notice are the shops and developers using them. With the code public, whoever spots a break can fix it, and anyone can add a missing bank by following the add-a-bank guide. If a real receipt from your bank fails, open an issue with the personal details removed.

cheki isn't affiliated with any bank or Ethio Telecom.

A screenshot is a claim. The bank's record is the proof.

Verify CBE and Telebirr payments in your app with a free API

cheki — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 05:08:07 +0000

If you sell online in Ethiopia, you know the flow. The customer pays by bank transfer or Telebirr, sends a screenshot, and someone on your team squints at it and decides whether to ship.

That decision is a guess. Screenshots are easy to edit and easy to reuse.

TL;DR: you can check the payment against the bank's own record with one free API call. No API key, no signup, no contract with the bank. Here's how, in Node or Python, plus the two checks most people forget.

First, which "Telebirr API" do you mean?

Search "telebirr api" or "cbe api" and you'll mostly find payment collection: APIs where you start a payment and wait for a callback. Those need a merchant agreement with the bank.

This post is about the other half: payment verification. The customer already paid the normal way, and you want to confirm the receipt they sent. That needs no agreement with anyone, because Ethiopian banks and wallets publish every receipt at a public URL.

How it works

Every bank publishes receipts differently: an HTML page for Telebirr, a link for CBE, a JSON endpoint for Bank of Abyssinia, a PDF for CBE Birr. cheki.et, a free and open-source checker, fetches the right one, reads it, sanity-checks it (positive amount, matching reference, not failed or pending) and gives you the same JSON shape for every bank.

10 banks and wallets are live: CBE, Telebirr, BOA, M-Pesa, Dashen, Awash, CBE Birr, Siinqee, eBirr and ZamZam. M-Pesa, ZamZam and CBE Birr are marked beta, as they're confirmed on few or no real receipts so far.

One request

curl -X POST https://cheki.et/api/verify \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"bank": "dashen", "reference": "B22WDTI00SAMPLE1"}'

No signup and no API key. The body takes bank plus whatever that bank needs:

Field	When
`reference`	Almost always: a receipt link, Receipt ID, transaction number or FT Ref
`accountNumber`	BOA (last 5 digits) and older CBE FT receipts (last 8 digits)
`phoneNumber`	CBE Birr (the payer's phone)
`qrData`	A scanned QR payload (BOA, CBE Birr, Telebirr)

That reference is made up, so you'll get a 422 back. A confirmed receipt looks like this (names and numbers are fake):

{
  "success": true,
  "verified": true,
  "bank": "Commercial Bank of Ethiopia",
  "bankCode": "cbe",
  "reference": "FT26SAMPLE01",
  "senderName": "ABEBE KEBEDE",
  "receiverName": "TIGIST ALEMU",
  "receiverAccount": "1****6171",
  "amount": 1250.5,
  "currency": "ETB",
  "date": "2026-10-01",
  "sourceUrl": "https://apps.cbe.com.et:100/?id=FT26SAMPLE0100006171",
  "cached": false
}

The one rule to remember: only verified: true means the bank confirmed it. success: true only means the request was handled. A BOA QR that BOA couldn't confirm comes back with success: true, verified: false, decodedOnly: true, and a QR can be copied. Don't ship on that.

The error codes are what you'd expect: 400 bad input, 404 unknown bank, 413 body too large, 422 the bank has no such receipt, 429 rate limited (with Retry-After), 502 the bank couldn't be reached. A 502 for a geo-blocked bank includes a fallbackUrl, which is the bank's own receipt page.

Node: cheki-verify

npm install cheki-verify   # 1.6.0, no dependencies, Node 20+

Before marking an order paid, ask two questions: did the bank confirm it, and is it this order's payment?

import { Cheki, isVerified, ChekiAPIError } from "cheki-verify";

const cheki = new Cheki();
const seen = new Set(); // use a UNIQUE column in your database instead

async function checkPayment(order, bank, reference) {
  let r;
  try {
    r = await cheki.verify(bank, reference);
  } catch (e) {
    if (e instanceof ChekiAPIError) {
      // 422: the bank has no such receipt. 502 + fallbackUrl: bank not reachable from the server.
      return { ok: false, why: e.serverMessage ?? e.message, openAtBank: e.fallbackUrl };
    }
    throw e; // network error or timeout: try again later, don't accept
  }
  if (!isVerified(r)) return { ok: false, why: "not confirmed by the bank" };
  if (r.amount !== order.amount) return { ok: false, why: `amount is ${r.amount}` };
  if (!r.receiverAccount?.endsWith(order.accountLast4)) return { ok: false, why: "paid to another account" };
  const key = `${r.bankCode}:${r.reference}`;
  if (seen.has(key)) return { ok: false, why: "receipt already used" };
  seen.add(key);
  return { ok: true, payer: r.senderName, date: r.date };
}

console.log(await checkPayment({ amount: 1250.5, accountLast4: "6171" }, "dashen", "B22WDTI00SAMPLE1"));

The last two checks are the ones people skip. A real receipt for money sent to someone else passes isVerified. So does a real receipt reused from last week. The bank knows nothing about your orders, so “confirmed” isn't the same as “paid to you, for this order”. That part lives in your code.

In the TypeScript SDK, any non-2xx response throws a ChekiAPIError (with statusCode, fallbackUrl and checkedUrl), and a 429 throws ChekiRateLimitError. It retries at most once, and only where that's safe.

Python: cheki

pip install cheki   # 1.6.0, needs only requests, Python 3.10+

The Python client returns a result for API errors instead of raising, so it reads as one if:

from cheki import ChekiClient

with ChekiClient() as cheki:
    r = cheki.verify("cbe", "https://mbreciept.cbe.com.et/fHCxExampleRcpt01")

    if r.is_verified:
        print(r.sender_name, "paid", r.amount, r.currency, "to", r.receiver_account, "on", r.date)
    elif r.fallback_url:
        print("Bank not reachable from the server. Open:", r.fallback_url)
    else:
        print(f"Not verified ({r.http_status}): {r.error}")

It also installs a small CLI, which is handy in a terminal: cheki-verify telebirr DET0SAMPLE --json. It exits 0 only when the bank confirmed the receipt.

End-of-day reconciliation

POST /api/verify/batch takes up to 20 receipts:

curl -X POST https://cheki.et/api/verify/batch \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"receipts": [
        {"bank": "dashen", "reference": "B22WDTI00SAMPLE1"},
        {"bank": "boa", "reference": "FT26SAMPLE07", "accountNumber": "12345"}
      ]}'

You get back total, verified, failed, cached and one result per receipt. Both SDKs wrap it as verifyBatch / verify_batch.

Limits and what's kept

Server side only. The API sends no CORS headers, so call it from your backend, not the browser.
Rate limits per IP: 30 checks a minute (each batch item counts), and 5 batch requests a minute. The SDKs export RECOMMENDED_BATCH_CHUNK (15) for long lists.
Storage: no accounts and no database. A receipt the bank confirmed stays in the server's memory for up to six hours, so a repeat check returns cached: true without asking the bank again. Failed checks are never kept.

The full reference is in the API docs, and the developer page has the Go, PHP and Dart SDKs as well.

Telebirr and M-Pesa: self-host it

Telebirr's and M-Pesa's receipt pages only answer from Ethiopian networks. The hosted API runs in Frankfurt, so for those two it returns a 502 with a fallbackUrl. A person at a counter can just tap that link on their phone. An automated checkout can't.

The fix is to run your own copy on a server in Ethiopia:

git clone https://github.com/1RB/cheki.git
cd cheki
docker compose up -d   # serves on http://localhost:3000

Then point the SDK at it:

const cheki = new Cheki({ baseUrl: "http://your-server:3000" });

cheki = ChekiClient(base_url="http://your-server:3000")

Every option is an environment variable, and all are optional. For example, CHEKI_CACHE=off turns off the in-memory cache if you'd rather keep nothing. There's a longer walkthrough in the self-hosting guide.

Other options

cheki isn't the only way to do this. check.et, verify.et and qbirr offer hosted APIs with keys and dashboards, and there are open-source libraries if you'd rather parse receipts inside your own app, such as tx-verify for Python and telebirr-receipt for Node. They all read the same public receipt pages. Pick based on which banks you need, whether you want an account and a dashboard, and whether you can run something on an Ethiopian network.

Help wanted

The weakest spots are the beta banks. If you have a real M-Pesa, ZamZam or CBE Birr receipt that cheki gets wrong, an issue on GitHub with the names and accounts redacted helps a lot. The repo has npm run probe -- <receipt-url> --redact for exactly that.

Why cheki is free, and why that matters

The banks publish every receipt for free, yet checking them is often sold back to businesses as API keys, monthly plans and per-check quotas. cheki started from a simple idea: you shouldn't pay to read a page your own bank already made public.

So it's MIT licensed: the web app, the API, every bank's parser and the TypeScript, Python, Go, PHP and Dart SDKs all live in one repo at github.com/1RB/cheki. Read exactly how a receipt is checked, self-host it, or send a fix.

For a tool like this, open source is practical. Banks change their receipt pages without warning, and developers like you are usually the first to notice. Whoever spots a broken parser can patch it, and new banks get added the same way, via the add-a-bank guide.

cheki isn't affiliated with any bank or Ethio Telecom.

A screenshot is a claim. verified: true is the proof.