What are Zelle transfer?
(Like most of the rest of the world has had for a decade or more, but it's new, and because it's new and there's very little education to consumers from the banks it's heavily used in scams. It also has a pretty confusing UX that lends itself to scams.)
So, they’re complicit in allowing the fraud to continue.
See the Zelle "getting started" page at https://www.zellepay.com/get-started - there's no solid set of instructions because there's almost two thousand different implementations of it. Your bank's procedure may be entirely different than mine's; if your bank doesn't support it it's a different procedure alltogether.
As a result, scammers can fairly easily convince someone who's never or infrequently used it that their process (usually with a phished website posing as Zelle) is legit. The "it's a banking technology, but it's also a website and an app, maybe, it depends" thing doesn't help.
I believe a single Zelle identity can only be linked to a single bank account, and a Zelle identity consists of an email address, phone number or both. Typically it's the "both" option, but I think that in theory you could create multiple identities with multiple email addresses, and link each to a separate bank account
I don't know the answer, but seeing as Zelle was developed by a consortium of big banks, it's at least possible they simply don't want to support this use case, because making it harder to have multiple accounts benefits incumbents.
If someone impersonates me or steals my debit card, they can do a bad ATM withdrawal and get cash. That can be reversed, but for some reason once Zelle is in the picture everything is written in stone.
It's rare that a lawsuit against a fraudster or thief goes anywhere, but depending on the amount lost, it can be worth it to obtain a default judgment, which can typically be collected for 10 years. If you can identify the person or entity that took your money, they might eventually have enough assets for you to collect.
US banks got scared by money transfer apps, and decided they want to provide a similar service, at no cost to customers, and minimal cost to them. Of course, they can't have it all, and now they try to put some costs they are not allowed to, onto their customers.
Seriously. If they can't, it will not be long until the omission is noticed.
In Slovenia, I can't make a bank transfer online when my bank is closed (at night). Money transfer between banks costs me 40 cents per transaction and international transfer in the EU costs me around 7 €.
Maestro card is instant and free and works even when the bank is closed, but it is only used for spending money.
I don't pay any fees for my bank account, since I'm younger than 27.
Price depends on the bank (and the type of bank account you have), but it's about 1 EUR or less.
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Many countries also have local payment systems, that are usually limited to a single country. For example, in Slovenia, we have Flik Pay, which allows sending money between individuals via mobile app, without any fees, and it also works 24/7.
I know about Flik and I like the appeal of it, but I do not use it because it requires a proprietary client (NLB Pay in my case). Do you know of any public or reverse engineered specification or unofficial FOSS client?
Are you sure about that? I thought with SEPA all Euro transfers within the EU have to be the same fee as national transfers, which is free for almost all consumer bank accounts in Austria.
My bank charges for instant transfers on my business account (around 8€), but other than that all transfers are free.
The ~7 € charge I remember was probably due to conversion. I wanted to send money to Croatia, which at the time did not use Euro yet.
Why is age relevant to fees?
Apparently they're not irreversible...
Most scammers generate authorized transactions via trickery. Banks won't accept "I was tricked" as "unauthorized"; they only count cases of actual account compromise, and even there... https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/03/business/nightcap-zelle-fraud...
> The bank data reviewed by Warren’s office suggest even the bulk of unauthorized cases are going unpaid. For example: PNC Bank indicated that its customers reported 10,683 cases of unauthorized payments totaling over $10.6 million. It refunded only 1,495 cases, totaling $1.46 million.
Regulation E (https://www.consumerfinance.gov/rules-policy/regulations/100...): "'Unauthorized electronic fund transfer' means an electronic fund transfer from a consumer's account initiated by a person other than the consumer without actual authority to initiate the transfer and from which the consumer receives no benefit."
How is "I willingly initiated a transfer to someone who turned out to be a scammer" within this definition?
There's a deeper story here though: * Banks are given a monopoly to almost literally print money. We ceded control of a very important facet of daily lives to them. * The cost for that is tight regulation, meant to make sure they keep the trust invested in them. * In the case of Zelle, and some other new products, banks, rushing to market, try to ignore their side of the deal. * Suggesting we should give up and accept that is morally, regulatory, and legally wrong. * Regulators and policy makers seem to agree with the above.
Elizabeth Warren's recent investigation brought this up as an issue, as well. I think regulation should cover the scam use case, but it's pretty clear to me it currently doesn't.
That's a good strategy to keep the heat off and avoid new regulation actually being made to cover the scenario, especially when it's a rare step taken by consumers. I tend to do the same if someone chargebacks us at work; it's not worth fighting, even if we're legally in the right.