Bank of America has lost Zelle transfers for many customers • Hacker News Board

Re: Bank of America has lost Zelle transfers for many customers

#261

Post by ceejayoz » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 7:57 PM UTC

snotrockets wrote: post #257

ceejayoz wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As such, regulation E holds. I've cited the exact wording of Regulation E to you elsewhere; it's pretty clear this scenario is not an unauthorized transfer.

It isn't. Law and regulation are interpreted by intent, not by a google search (also see official interpretation 2(m)-4 there)

> Law and regulation are interpreted by intent

Nothing in Regulation E indicates an intent to cover intentional transfers by the account holder to scammers. Quote something specific if you disagree.

> also see official interpretation 2(m)-4 there

None of those scenarios match "I willingly sent money to something that turned out to be a scam". At all.

Each example in that interpretation is that of an unintentional transfer - bank employees doing it, stolen devices, being under duress.

Re: Bank of America has lost Zelle transfers for many customers

#262

Post by mcguire » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 7:58 PM UTC

tristor wrote: post #150

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> few grams of gold or silver I remember, a few years ago, Cupertino being targeted for burglaries because the Indian and Taiwanese immigrant populations had a penchant for storing wealth in gold and silver and cash under the mattress, respectively. The victims’ recovery rates and timelines were far poorer than these BofA customers’ will be.

Which is an interesting comparison because these are not the only immigrant populations that do this, there are large groups of immigrant populations in Texas who are largely unbanked or underbanked or have cultural penchants for using gold and silver as stores of value, but there has been no concerted effort to burglarize them, because strings of home invasions in Texas usually end up with the home invaders in a bod…

This is false.

Texas and California are roughly tied in burglaries per capita, 370.7 and 369.7 per 100,000. New Mexico has the most, at 648.8/100,000. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/232580/burglary-rate-in-...) Interestingly, New Mexico has a bit more than three times as many guns per capita as Texas. (https://www.statista.com/chart/21894/firearms-in-each-state/)

Property crime rates are going to be suppressed in Texas among the (undocumented) immigrant population because of a justifiable lack of trust between them and police. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pam.22221) The NCVS should give better data, but I'm damned if I can find it.

Re: Bank of America has lost Zelle transfers for many customers

#263

Post by noahtallen » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 7:58 PM UTC

Maursault wrote: post #110

Zelle is the choice of scammers. Incidentally, Zelle offers no guarantees or refunds. I don't know why anyone would use Zelle under those circumstances. Some banks will automagically sign their customers up for Zelle accounts, exposing them to scam risks for which there is no resolution. Money gone.

IMO, the risk is pretty minimal. Zelle isn’t a 3rd party payment platform — it’s a feature/standard a bank implements to give you instant peer-to-peer bank transfers. Zelle the company is owned by the banks, including Bank of America.

So this is just BoA adding a feature they partly created to their banking suite. That in itself isn’t a red flag.

Zelle itself is also secure. You have to be fully logged into your bank account to use it! So it’s as secure as any banking service.

The reason someone would use Zelle is p2p bank transfers between people you know. Like if your friend wrote you a check to cover their half of a hotel on a vacation. Just replace that with Zelle. It’s better than, say, Venmo because it goes directly between bank accounts immediately, without the intermediate third party and waiting 3 days for Venmo to give you your money.

The only risk you’re exposed to is if you blindly send money to someone you don’t know, which you shouldn’t be doing on most platforms. (For example, you only really get buyer protection using goods and services type transfers on other payment apps, which have extra transaction fees.)

I think the end line is that banks should have better fraud protection for bank accounts. Including debit cards, ACH, checks, and Zelle. I supposed my summary is that Zelle isn’t really unique. It’s just faster bank transfers

Re: Bank of America has lost Zelle transfers for many customers

#264

Post by mcguire » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 7:58 PM UTC

pkaye wrote: post #252

WillPostForFood wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1: The data is obviously completely bogus unless you believe there were only 11 burglaries in Florida in all of 2021. You can't draw anything from it. 2: Texas is the second most populous state, so total # has little value. You need the per capita number to understand whether their might be some deterrence happening. Unfortunately the Statista data is garbage, so it isn't worth calculating.

So where is a good source of data?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/232580/burglary-rate-in-...

Re: Bank of America has lost Zelle transfers for many customers

#265

Post by ezfe » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 7:58 PM UTC

neon_electro wrote: post #18

gnicholas wrote: post #13

When my older relatives wanted to send money to family/friends, I used to recommend Zelle, which was better than the never-heard-of-it apps they were considering. But with all the problems I keep hearing about Zelle, they're off the list. Most of them have iPhones and so I just tell them to send cash via Messages/Apple Cash. I don't know how reversible that sort of thing is, in the case of fraud, but as long as they…

I no longer recommend Cash App (formerly Square Cash) because they explicitly removed the ability to have inbound transactions be automatically deposited into your bank account. They left it on for anyone who already had it on, but I specifically signed my dad up on the assumption that sending him money would be as frictionless as possible. Instead, Square/Block would love for that money to stay in the Cash App accou…

I don't actually blame them for this, because they have to make money somehow. If they make money by having your money in your account for a few hours/days, idc.

So long as they make it frictionless to start a withdrawal - a tap or two, that's all I ask.

Re: Bank of America has lost Zelle transfers for many customers

#266

Post by snotrockets » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 7:58 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #248

snotrockets wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competent (non-software) professionals would read the initiation as the intent, also see comment 4 there, suggesting the mindset of the regulator. As a reminder, regulations are always subject to the interpereation of the regulator, which, as history shows in the case of regulation E, tends to side with the consumers. There's a deeper story here though: * Banks are given a monopoly to almost literally print money. We…

The expandable "Official interpretation of 2(m) Unauthorized Electronic Fund Transfer" section makes it pretty clear what sort of things they consider to be covered under the regulation. If they thought it covered scams, it's highly likely they'd say so there. 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…

Whenever people pushed the banks, they were made whole. The problem with any such issue is that it requires some knowledge and patience on how to get the bank to comply, and most people lack those (through no fault of their own: this isn't trivial).

Re: Bank of America has lost Zelle transfers for many customers

#267

Post by ezfe » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 8:00 PM UTC

explodingwaffle wrote: post #44

gnicholas wrote: post #13

When my older relatives wanted to send money to family/friends, I used to recommend Zelle, which was better than the never-heard-of-it apps they were considering. But with all the problems I keep hearing about Zelle, they're off the list. Most of them have iPhones and so I just tell them to send cash via Messages/Apple Cash. I don't know how reversible that sort of thing is, in the case of fraud, but as long as they…

Brit here- I usually send money to friends and family using bank transfers with internet banking- it’s instant, there’s no fee (AFAIK) and all you need are someone’s account number, and sort code, which everyone has. Is this just not an option in the states? It’s insane to me that y’all use (need??) third party apps for something as simple as sending money around.

FedNow is scheduled to come this year and provide instant money transfer. We already have delayed money transfer services run by the government.

Zelle is just a private sector solution since the government hadn't built it out yet.

Re: Bank of America has lost Zelle transfers for many customers

#268

Post by notch656c » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 8:00 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #208

notch656c wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An important consideration here is unrest is in part in response to perceived factors in the economic collapse. Even if one takes the position the measures are not the cause of the collapse they can still be a cause of unrest.

> if one takes the position the measures are not the cause of the collapse they can still be a cause of unrest You’re missing that the measures have been taken in other contexts without unrest, e.g. Iceland, Cyprus, FDR’a gold confiscation. If X always precedes Y, and Z sometimes does but sometimes doesn’t (and when it does, is twinned with X), and we witness X, Z and Y, X is the dominant explanation for Y.

" there are four kinds of countries: developed countries, underdeveloped countries, Japan, and Argentina."

-- Simon Kuznets

Re: Bank of America has lost Zelle transfers for many customers

#269

Post by ceejayoz » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 8:00 PM UTC

snotrockets wrote: post #266

ceejayoz wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The expandable "Official interpretation of 2(m) Unauthorized Electronic Fund Transfer" section makes it pretty clear what sort of things they consider to be covered under the regulation. If they thought it covered scams, it's highly likely they'd say so there. 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…

Whenever people pushed the banks, they were made whole. The problem with any such issue is that it requires some knowledge and patience on how to get the bank to comply, and most people lack those (through no fault of their own: this isn't trivial).

> Whenever people pushed the banks, they were made whole.

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.

Re: Bank of America has lost Zelle transfers for many customers

#270

Post by phpisthebest » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 8:00 PM UTC

ctoth wrote: post #10

I have long been terrified of something shaped a bit like this. Here in the US we already treat most workers like absolute garbage. If one day the Average Joe wakes up and finds that all his money is merely some electronic scribbles in a database which have mysteriously gone missing, the social unrest is probably something that most people on this site couldn't even conceptualize of. Today it's Zelle, but what happen…

20 years ago I wrote software to automatically scan paper checks, OCR and MICR data, and then do ACH transactions...

After seeing all the problems and insecurity in the banking system I now keep at minimum of 1 month of expenses in hard cash in my safe at all times, and I have multiple accounts at different credit unions, and I stop using banks completely.