Zelle Scams to Know Before It's Too Late

how's it going everybody this is beat the bush today I'm going to talk about Zell scams and what you need to know before they happen to you at least for me I never sign up for Zell it's like they're trying to compete with vemo cash app or PayPal it's like the banks thought we need some kind of digital transfer system that's a lot faster so let's make this zelle thing up and shove it down everybody's throat because as long as you have a bank account you probably have Zell already whether you like it or not the thing is Zell transactions are not protected like credit card transactions and ATM transactions once it goes through it's through you're not gonna get your money back no matter what ninety percent of all Zell scams are never recovered so it's good for you to just know about these scams so that the next time it happens to you you would know what to do and prevent from such things happening to you now how does Zell work you either give them a phone number or an email and then they go on their bank account put in that phone number or email and they send you money just like that that they plop it goes right over I sell stuff on Facebook Marketplace and sometimes you would get scammers trying to ask you to send money to you in advance so then they're like okay how do I do that I want to pay you first what's your Zell phone number or email address prepaying is actually really uncommon for me although I have received prepayment maybe one time out of like a hundred transactions or so they pay me in advance via vemo which seems a little awkward you know just receiving money and I still have the product it's like they really really trust me for some reason whenever someone wants to prepay you that's a red flag right there why are they being so nice right some excuses they might make up is that they don't have cash to pay you in person they're going to ask their partner or something to pay you or they're going to pay you themselves before you meet you could just say Okay pay via Zell but we need to meet first and then you can pay on the spot right there they might make up excuses saying they don't know how to use vemo or other transfer services so they only have Zell so why don't you give them your phone number or email and then they can you know do it slowly and somehow get it transferred to you so don't do that wait until you meet someone in person hopefully in broad daylight and also in somewhere that's kind of busy in a public area that way if they try to run with your product you know they might have security guards around that might catch them they have bystanders that might help you another one is job scams you are looking for a job when you apply for a job never ever pay money to get a job a job should be paying you so sometimes they might disguise themselves as saying you might need to front up upfront costs to pay for work equipment to pay for some inventory because if your sales you might have to do that so whenever a job asks you to pay upfront especially if they ask you to pay via Zell then that is a huge red flag another one could be them pretending that there is a fraudulent transaction on your account somehow they're able to obtain your phone number or your email then they start messaging you they have some kind of fake message saying that there's a fraudulent transaction on your Zell account it can go something like this did you attempt a Zell payment for two thousand dollars on February 20th respond yes to confirm or no to report a far joint transaction now this sounds very legitimate I've gotten texts and messages from my credit card companies whenever I make something somewhat suspicious like a large transaction they would ask me to confirm that transaction so they're posing as a message that looks like that so when you say no I did not attempt this via text message then this is coming from a fraudulent scammer here then they know oh yeah you're in the loop here so then you might get a call later on and then they're going to walk you through a system where you transferred money over so in order to stop this from happening what you can do is just transfer money to yourself and they're going to send you a link to do that so once you click that link it actually looks like it's to your account but instead it's actually you sending money not to yourself but instead you're sending it to the scammer instead so once you do that your money is gone they disappear with your money another one is that you sell something online it could be an auction site or whatever maybe the listing ended successfully and someone is legitimately about to buy it but you get an email saying that you've been paid via a Zell account but this is a business account so you cannot actually retrieve the money in order to retrieve the money you need to upgrade your account and they're going to list various amounts of money maybe a hundred dollar for a one year subscription or maybe as high as like one thousand dollars to get a business account so once you get into this system saying okay I'm gonna upgrade my account in order to receive my money of I don't know thousands of dollars whatever that you sold then you inadvertently paid them another one I don't hear people talk about is a link that is loaded with malware so it can be a link that looks legitimate but then as soon as you click it you don't even have to like put in any kind of login information as soon as you click it it takes advantage of some kind of browser vulnerability in your computer or on your phone and it loads a back door into those devices and then once they get in they can do whatever they want on your computer look up some passwords or whatnot so that's why it's so dangerous to click on the link from someone that you don't know from some phone number that you don't know so even if it's like hey take a look at this funny picture or something once you click it bam right there you've given access to a scammer to your entire computer at which point they can go and sift through a bunch of data find login information and whatnot a less sophisticated one that doesn't require as much computer knowledge and like security hacks or whatnot it's just phishing scans and I get a lot more of those those than these loaded malware type of links of course they also have phishing scams it can happen to your Zell account where they ask you to verify your login information I personally think this is a little played out because people have caught on it's like what login for information right most of the time you should just go to the website yourself type it in and make sure that it's spelled correctly you think you're at the correct website and it looks like Bank of America but it isn't I know one time I used a gift card website you know those little Visa gift card thing and then I typed it in I spelled it wrong or something oh my gosh I was freaking out because it was just slightly off and it's obviously it's a scammer website made to look like the original website whenever you have a transaction End online and it's publicly available you might have other scammers out there monitoring this and then they're like okay maybe they're about to pay via Zell so they would send you an email asking you to send a small amount to that account this is kind of like when you try to verify a bank account right they deposit like two small sums like 24 cents and 27 cents and then in order to verify that your bank account is linked you go back to the initiating bank account and then you go okay the amount that you sent was 20 cents whatever amount so it's kind of like that it's asking you to send a small amount just one dollar or whatever and then they can verify that things are working after all the verification is done you will get refunded that small amount so you're like okay I really need to send this money to them in order to purchase whatever product it is that you purchase so you type in your login information and right there you know you're you're dead right there because that website is the scammers website and you just gave them your login information they take your login information they log into your account and they do whatever send budget Zell fraudulent transactions to their own Zell and then they take your money and run they're like halfway around the world you can't catch them rental scams this is a big one because it involves huge amounts of money it can be thousands of dollars because it involves security deposits and rents is quite expensive these days so in order to protect yourself know that there can be fake properties there could be legitimate looking properties that the scammer copied and then they just changed the contacts so when you contact that particular listing it's not the person that you really want to talk to and they don't even own the property for rentals especially with the pandemic and stuff right they might avoid in-person viewing of the property so they're like okay we're only going to do virtual tours everything is virtual so you never see the person and then at some point you've never seen one person you want to rent the place and then they ask you to send money for the security deposit some money for the background check and also the application fee and they ask you to send it via Zell if they're asking for that you just say no I'm not going to send it through that it's not secure you really really want to see the property in person don't send money via venmo cryptos gift cards instead use wire transfers cashiers check or even personal check those are a lot more secure you can track them down you can see which bank account you are sending it to or which bank account they have deposited to if it's found that it's fraudulent there's a much bigger chance that they can reverse those charges because it's in actually someone's bank account that is linked to someone's name with a driver's license personally I think gazelle has gotten out of hand the fact that it's so not secure and that you can't get your money back if there's some fraudulent activity mix it so that I even want to disable access to it on my bank accounts I hope this helps you avoid some of these scams remember whenever you make a huge transaction of whatever amount like over a thousand dollars I recommend to consult with someone that you trust just kind of talk it over with them it's like I think I'm gonna do this this and this you know it's going to cost me this much what do you think about it right you think this is fraudulent or not and oftentimes these fraudulent activities they really pressure you in high pressure tactics saying oh it's only available for a limited time for just today or the next few hours so you better send that money quick quick thanks for watching this video don't forget to give me a like And subscribe for more thanks for watching [Music] thank you [Music] [Music]

Channel: BeatTheBush

Views: 14,997

Keywords: personal finance, financial independence, FIRE, zelle scams, how to avoid zelle scams, reclaim zelle fraud, zelle fraud schemes, zelle fraud cases explode consumers lose millions, zelle frauds, scams in india, scams that should be legal

Id: VzEAJNnSdWw

Length: 11min 3sec (663 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2023