The Expert Podcast

Over the past few years, there have been many thousands of victims of online fraud that have sent money using the platform Zelle. Zelle is a platform created by many of the large banks—Wells Fargo, JP Morgan—and that platform was used to make it easy to transfer money from account holders at these banks to third parties. You can use it to pay in the same way you might use Venmo or other platforms. The problem is, because it was so easy to send money, scammers and fraudsters used it as a way to take money from unsuspecting victims.

Since there were less safeguards on that system than things like credit card merchant accounts or even wire transfers, many times the victims sent money unknowingly to fraudulent third parties. Sometimes the Zelle accounts are hacked, sometimes they faked the second-party authentication, sometimes they just used Zelle as a way to transfer money for misrepresented fraud.

Well, now these chickens are coming home to roost. There have been major lawsuits, and sometimes States Attorneys General have stepped in and said, "Look, this platform was used by scammers, so now the banks have liability."

Well, there's an ongoing settlement in place where Zelle and the banks are looking to possibly reimburse some of these victims. So if you've been a victim of a fraud and the money went through Zelle, get in contact with your bank or take a look at this ruling. The FTC may get involved, where you may have the ability to get reimbursed for your losses.

This is a relatively new development and it's ongoing. There are going to be updates to this as time goes on, but you might want to get in the process now so you're first in line to get reimbursements from a loss that may have occurred using this Zelle money transfer platform to send money to a fraudster or scammer.