People Keep Asking Reddit If They're Being Scammed On Zelle And Venmo

For many of life's problems, Reddit is the place that people of different age groups first turn to for answers.

There are subreddits for everything from science and medical questions to obscure hobbies and finding people from your hometown. In the case of finance, there is the storied /WallStreetBets. The 2023 Digital Investor Survey from the Brunswick Group found that 58% of advisers working on behalf of institutional banks and hedge funds admitted to peeking through what is written on the platform before advising clients.

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Reddit is also, for many people, the place they go to when they suspect they are getting scammed. In the last 24 hours, several people turned to the /PersonalFinance subreddit to ask for advice on whether a strange things they were seeing on different payment platforms was in fact a scam.

'Am I Being Scammed?' Is A Very Common Reddit Question

"Currently trying to sell a used PS4," writes Reddit user u/TripleThreatT1. "Have a buyer interested, said she would Venmo me the amount. Said she did it yesterday, however I have no email of anything pending or notification that the amount went through."

While Reddit users were quick to point out that the latter is almost certainly a common scam in which someone tries to get the owner to send the item without actually transferring money, there were also a number of posts about seeing duplicate payments for Zelle transfers — not a scam but a system glitch for customers of Chase Bank  (JPM) - Get Free Report..

"I have a feeling Zelle has a widespread glitch that there'll probably be a press release and news articles," one Redditor wrote reassured the person asking why a "payment to [a landlord] had somehow duplicated."

Sure enough, a representative for JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced that this was a glitch and that the bank was "working to resolve the issue and [...] automatically reverse any duplicates and adjust any related fees" a few hours later.

Here's Why People Turn To Reddit (And What You Can Do If You Suspect A Problem)

A representative for Early Warning Services, the operator behind Zelle co-owned by seven of the country's largest banks, told TheStreet that users seeing any kind of problem should immediately contact the platform or, in the cause of suspected fraud, report it immediately.

But given the red tape involved in getting a large company to make a public statement, Reddit is often the first and fastest place to go when they suspect a problem and something is unclear — even when, in some cases, the information may be preliminary or even inaccurate.

There has, over the last year, been a rise in in conversation around different scams related to various digital payment platforms — on June 1, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a statement waning  instant payment platform users about the fact that Cash App and Zelle do not have the same insurance protections as traditional banks.

While fraud instances account for only 0.1% of all total total transactions, Zelle and other instant payment platforms have started to get a reputation for not being beholden to the same refund and insurance standards as traditional banks.

As a result, government watchdogs advise against keeping large sums of money in the platform and instead encourage users to periodically transfer funds to a traditional bank account.