ZELLE USERS BEWARE!

ZELLE USERS BEWARE!

While I was training in Baltimore, I did my usual weekly sign-in to my account and suddenly noticed that my account had been depleted by $3657.00 via the Zelle send money function. Something that I only used between my mother and myself a limited number of times. Upon a hasty research of transactions, I saw 1 payment of 30 dollars go out to Yang Chen LLC and then come back within the same day. Essentially the hacker was confirming that it worked. I then noticed 5-7 more transactions within a matter of 48 hours appear on my statement. These were much larger sums of money being transferred via Zelle without my knowledge or consent. These sums were sent without a memo and were not performed by anyone that I know or consented to perform on my behalf.

I immediately called the fraud department at Chase to which the operator said, "O no, this has been happening a lot lately'. Filed my claim and Chase then reimbursed my account on the stolen funds while they perform their internal review. To add to this, they had to shut down my online account and I was also told that I needed to visit a banking branch in person to create a new account. Because of where I live, I had to change who I bank with entirely as well as revise and update all the payment and accounts that had been linked to this Chase account in the past.

Fast forward to last week. I get a letter and a call from Chase. The letter and the call both informed me that I now owe Chase Bank the 3657.00 dollars. The same amount that was stolen from me via Zelle. They say that I now owe them this money because their internal fraud department found that the IP address that linked to the Zelle payments came from my personal laptop that only I have access to. I spent 2 hours trying to work my way up through the delinquent account representatives to get a My manager is busy, they will have to call you back later to respond with better info response. So, right at dinner time I get the call back. I explain to the manager on the phone the history of the situation, my historical use of Zelle, how insane it sounds for me to send these lump sums of cash to random people with no memo or note as to what the payments were for especially with how my historical use of Zelle shows when/whom/how often I send money with this function. That logic would dictate, somehow someone hacked my computer (most likely via a botnet) thus back dooring into my computer remotely and then used that ability to get into my chase account and move these funds to unknown people via Zelle transfer option.

Now, here s is where my frustration turned into complete RAGE. While sitting on the phone in the car with my wife, the Manager tried to inform me that it was physically impossible for someone to do such a thing. That he himself came from IT and that no one could back door into a computer via a virus (bot net code) and do such a thing so that the transactions would show that it was my computer and not someone other than me that created these transfers. To add injury to INSULT, he had the audacity to imply that my wife and I s relationship was so unsound that she perhaps snuck onto my computer and made these transactions herself on my behalf via Zelle. He also added that I should now, THREE MONTHS LATER, follow up with the local police department as they somehow could track online banking transactions and can somehow get my money back that Chase so kindly lost for me. At this point I told the manager that this conversation was useless. I will not pay Chase back for money that was blatantly stolen from my account. That if he does not have the ability to revise the research and/or redo the investigation and delete the debt that Chase believes is owed to them than I have nothing more to say.

I have more to my rant about how unsecured the Zelle quick pay functions on a whole but Google is limiting my characters at the moment. Either way I NOW LOATH CHASE BANK!