Figured I would share my experience as a cautionary tale for those looking to use Zelle for any significant amounts of $.
Made a payment to a known associate back on 09/29 using the Capital One android app Zelle feature. Payment was for $2K. Thought nothing of it as I had used Zelle successfully in the past without issues. Yesterday I get a text from my associate asking where the money was. I reviewed my capital one records and saw that the funds left my account as I expected on 09/29. Call into the capital one support line of course its after 5:00 EST so they are gone for the day.
Call them again this morning and ask what happened. They cannot really tell but offer to cancel the transaction. I agree and hold while they do so. A couple minutes later they come back on the line and tell me that the payment cannot be cancelled but they are not sure why. After waiting another 20 minutes to get a "supervisor" on the line where I get pretty much the same story. The money is lost and I will need to file a claim with them to figure out what happened. They transfer me to the claims department but the call gets dropped. Total time on that call 1h.
Later today I call in again to try my luck and spend another 30 minutes of them offering to cancel and not being able to and finally getting routed to claims. Claims reads all the information about the case back to me gives me a claim number and tells me that they will be in contact within 2-3 days and the money will be credited "provisionally" within 10 if they cannot make a determination and the full investigation can take as long as 45 days. Spent another hour on the phone with CapOne same net result. My $ has been in limbo for 10 days already will likely be in that state for at least another 10 while they figure out what happened. Its not at all clear where the problem is given that there are at least 3 parties involved in the transaction. CapOne,Zelle, My partners bank. The disappointing part was that my bank Capital one took no ownership of their customers problem and essentially said we'll get back to you. I asked them to call Zelle while I was on the line and they had no number other than the main Zelle customer support number to use so we tried that for ten minutes but could never get past the robot. Based on this experience Im guessing that the backend of the Zelle transaction is a lot messier than the marketing materials make it seem. I can also say that customer support from Zelle in this instance was non existent. I mean if their partner Capital One cannot get them on the phone what chance does a customer have?
As an experiment today I sent a couple of small payments to this same associate one via their email address and one via their phone number. These two small transactions both worked fine within a couple of minutes meanwhile the 2k is still lost in the ether.
Ill update when I get something from CapOne or Zelle. You've been warned.
Submitted October 09, 2018 at 08:55PM by kevindstone https://ift.tt/2QDenJi
