Happy Thanksgiving from BrightDime!

We hope you had a restful Thanksgiving holiday last week. We’re taking a break from our series on common financial myths this week to warn you of a scam that’s been seen a lot lately.

The scam usually starts with a text message that appears to be from a bank asking you about a recent Zelle transaction. (Zelle is a way to quickly transfer money from person to person used by many banks in the US. Think Venmo, but within your bank account.) The text message asks you if you recognize this transaction and to reply “Y” or “N.” Either way, if you reply you’ll get a call shortly from someone who says they work at the bank and they need to confirm your username to proceed with this fraud investigation. You give them your username, and then they tell you they’re sending you a code, all you need to do is read it back to them and everything will be taken care of. You hang up, relieved to have caught that fraud before it cost you money.

But that’s not what really happened. When you replied “Y” or “N” to the text, you got a call from a scammer pretending to be from the bank. They probably sounded legit, with lots of jargon about fraud procedures, and identify verification. When you “confirmed” your username, you supplied them with your bank account username. Then they used that to initiate a password reset (you know that “I forgot my password” link on every login page) and then you read them the real identity verification code the bank sent to your phone to make sure it was really you trying to reset your password. It wasn’t, but now that password has been reset by the scammers, they can log into your account and they can use Zelle to transfer money out while you’re none the wiser.

It’s a pretty clever scam, but if you’ve read our tips for spotting and stopping scams you know there are some tell tale signs that give it away. If you haven’t read it yet, you can find it right here.

(If you want to read more about the Zelle scam, here’s a link to the original article: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/11/the-zelle-fraud-scam-how-it-works-how-to-fight-back/)