P2P payment service Zelle sued for enabling payment fraud hell New York State is suing bank-owned peer-to-peer payment app Zelle, claiming that the banks behind it knew fraud was rampant on the platform but allowed scammers to conduct business with impunity. New York Attorney General Letitia James' office last week announced that it had sued Early Warning Services, LLC (EWS), the company …
banks would typically tell victims that there was no way to retrieve stolen funds
Banks saying stolen funds ‘can’t be retrieved’ is absurd. They can reverse charges, claw back mistaken deposits, and freeze accounts whenever it benefits them - but when it’s a fraud victim, suddenly the system is ‘irreversible’ and people somehow just nod, like it's normal.
"Banks saying stolen funds ‘can’t be retrieved’ is absurd. They can reverse charges, claw back mistaken deposits, and freeze accounts whenever it benefits them - but when it’s a fraud victim, suddenly the system is ‘irreversible’ and people somehow just nod, like it's normal."
From a technical standpoint they could, but from a contractual/legal standpoint, they can't.
Zelle was built to lower the risk to the banks from fraud by nearly eliminating the protections that are common in debit/credit card payments and bank transfers. CashApp, Venmo, et al are the same way. Why use Venmo if you have a PayPal account? They've made it faster and easier and substituted convenience for safety without making that adjustment clear to people by doing a big push on the convenience aspect.
People running the scams aren't leaving money in an accessible account. The money is swept from those accounts quickly, often to accounts in other countries and converted to cash to break the ability of being confiscated. As soon as a fraudulent account is shut down or queried, the fraudsters will drop the bridges into the river and quietly sneak away.
I don't accept any of those payment methods. With an old fashioned check (cheque), I have a load of legal recourse and don't expose my own accounts accepting them. Cash is very lovely and debit/credit card payments are not that hard or costly to accept these days as they were some decades ago. As most people want to use cards, I have upped my prices to amortize the fees I'm charged. Customers that pay cash (usually just the smaller ones) get a discount.
Scammers are posing as lawyers and offering to recover funds stolen from victims of cryptocurrency scams.
You've got to admit that those particular scammers sure know how to pick a chump. From the self-select group of crypto "investors" you then skim off the cream by targeting those who've already been scammed.
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