So today at 12pm I decided to create a Zelle within my own bank's mobile app. Everything went fine and I synced my phone number with it successfully. Then 5 hours afterwards, I receive a text saying that someone Zelle'd me a bit over $1000 dollars. I looked at my bank account and sure enough, it was deposited right away in my account. Instant red flags everywhere.
Who was this person? How'd he get my number? Why did this happen the same day I make my Zelle? Very suspicious from the start.
Of course I received a call from someone a few minutes later saying it was an accident and that he meant to send it to a number 1 digit off from mine. I told him I'd look into it. I then looked up scams like this and sure enough, I see exact scenarios. So I called him saying I shouldn't do anything and he should call his bank to sort this out.
Afterwards, I found out that the scams I looked up earlier were mostly with apps not related to the banks themselves(Venmo, Paypal, etc) Where the scammer asks people to send back the "accident" to them and they do some sort of chargeback to get the "accident" money and newly sent money in their account- effectively twice their initial amount. Whereas in Zelle, the scams I only read were of services and goods. For example, person 1 is selling a ticket, and person 2 Zelle's person 1 and then gets ghosted by person 1 because people apparently can't do a chargeback on Zelle and banks don't do anything about it?
So after reading all this, I'm starting to believe that maybe it really is an accident? Once someone receives money in their account from Zelle, it becomes final? If that's the case, then even if that person I talked to called their bank, they probably wouldn't be successful in receiving their money and I wouldn't mind having to Zelle them back their initial amount. What are your thoughts on this? Am I missing anything and is this still some sort of scam?
Submitted January 02, 2019 at 02:06AM by Velonic http://bit.ly/2AALmIT
