Ars Technica writes about the increased amount of fraud being used in the popular mobile banking app Zelle. There have beene $255 million in fraud and scam claims on Zelle in 2022, which is a huge increase from 2020’s $90 million in fraud and scam claims. What’s worse – a lot of these claims are not being reimbursed.
Since the creation of money, people have always been trying to separate you from your money. While the addition of technology into our lives have made every aspect of them easier, it has also created new vectors for nefarious people to perform the timeless activities of scamming people. With technology you have to worry about breaking through security and brute-forcing their way into a system to get what they want. This can take some serious time and resources and may not be worth the effort on a small scale. The easier way to get what they want with these smaller targets is through technology’s second security vector – good old-fashioned manipulation.
If someone wants you to send them money online, you get an email claiming some large purchase was made but you can easily refund it by calling a phone number that’s provided in the email, or anything that causes you to react with anxiety or fear – pause for a moment before doing anything. These scammers want you to act quickly and without thinking, so the best thing you can do is to take a moment and evaluate whether the message you received is even legitimate or not.