Zelle finally caves after years of refusing to refund scam victims

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

After scammers spent years swiping hundreds of millions from Zelle users by inducing people to authorize fraudulent payments, lawmakers were horrified to discover in fall 2022 that "the vast majority" of defrauded Zelle users never got their money back. To regulators, it seemed like Zelle was shirking responsibility for policing this increasingly common fraudulent activity on its payments platform.

But now, Zelle has changed its mind and is working harder to protect users from imposter scams. On Monday, Zelle confirmed that at the end of June, the payments app finally started refunding users targeted by scammers.

According to Reuters, this was possible because Zelle's network operator, Early Warning Services (EWS), found a solution that lets Zelle's network of 2,100 financial firms off the hook for reimbursing transactions where "potentially billions of dollars" might be stolen by imposter scammers. Instead of expecting financial partners to foot the bill to cover this fraudulent activity, Zelle simply "implemented a mechanism that allows banks to claw back funds from the recipient's account and return them to the sender."