You have seen the place, you want it, and someone is telling you that another person is interested. This is the moment where money moves fastest and where nearly everything that goes wrong in a tenancy goes wrong.
None of the checks below take more than a few minutes. All of them are difficult to raise once the money has gone.
1. Confirm you're dealing with someone entitled to let it
Ask directly: are you the landlord, or an agent? If an agent, for which company, and can they show something that connects them to the property: a management agreement, a letter of authority, a business card that matches the company on the paperwork.
Nobody genuine is offended by this. People who are offended by it are telling you something.
2. Get the agreement before the money, not after
The tenancy agreement should exist, in full, before you pay anything, including the deposit. Read the term, notice, deposit and rent-review clauses at minimum. See reading a lease before you sign it for what to look for.
If you are told the agreement comes later, treat that as a reason to wait rather than a formality.
3. Check the account name
Money should go to an account in the name of the landlord or the agency on the agreement. Not to a personal number given verbally on the day. Not to a "colleague who handles payments". Not to a different name with an explanation attached.
An account name that doesn't match the party on the paperwork is the clearest signal there is, and it is the last point at which the money is still yours.
4. Get a receipt that says what the payment was for
"Payment received, 45,000" is not a receipt, it is a note. What you want is the amount split across what it settled: deposit, first month's rent, anything else, each on its own line, with the date and the unit.
That split is what makes the deposit a deposit later. Without it, a landlord's memory that "the first payment was rent" is as good a record as yours that it was not.
5. Do the move-in record the same week
Photograph every room and every existing defect. Photograph both meters with the digits legible. Email the lot to the agency with a short covering note, and keep the sent message.
Twenty minutes, on the day you get the keys, decides the deposit conversation two years from now.
The urgency question
If any of the five above cannot be done because there is no time, then there is no time to pay either. Manufactured urgency is the oldest technique in this market and it works precisely because it targets the moment you have already decided.
A unit that is genuinely competitive can survive you asking for the account name and reading the agreement. Nothing that can't survive that is worth what you were about to pay for it.