Chase Bank will be blocking Zelle payments to sellers on social media platforms and messaging apps starting March 23.
The banking company updated its user policy on Monday (via Bleeding Computer) to warn Zelle users that it will delay, decline, and/or block payments made through social media in an effort to protect consumers from online scams and fraud. It wrote that the popular payment is meant to send money to people users know, not other people they meet on social media — which, unfortunately, includes those selling goods on Instagram and TikTok, among other platforms.
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“To help protect you from fraud and scams, the Zelle Service should be used for payments between friends, family, and others you trust and should not be used to pay for goods from recipients with whom you are not familiar,” the new policy reads. “The Service is not intended, and should not be used, for the purchase of goods from retailers, merchants, or the like, including on or through social media or social media marketplaces or messaging apps. If you are sending a Zelle payment from your Chase account that is identified as originating from contact through social media, we may, in our discretion delay, decline or block that payment.”
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Chase’s new policy against Zelle payments through social media comes two months after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) filed a lawsuit against Zelle and Chase, along with two other banks that own Zelle — Wells Fargo and Bank of America — accusing them of “failing to protect consumers from widespread fraud on America’s most widely available peer-to-peer payment network.” The lawsuit alleged that Early Warning Systems, the financial tech company that runs Zelle, rushed the payment network out to the market to compete with other payment platforms like PayPal and Venmo without any safeguards from fraud and other scams, and that customers of all three banks lost $870 million since Zelle’s launch in 2017 due to the banks’ failure to investigate the complaints and reimburse the money lost to scams that involved the use of Zelle.
People use Zelle to buy things from social media platforms that they may not find on Amazon otherwise, especially when the merchandise is sold by small businesses they want to support. Not everyone will like the idea of being unable to send a Zelle payment to their favorite small owner in an Instagram DM, but it’s for everyone’s safety and security.
