I didn't know that Zelle was a thing until one of my credit card issuers recently sent me an email along the lines of "don't use it, it's only for fraud". I immediately assumed that it was because they were sad that they weren't included in the alliance or something like that. They maybe have their competing service that they want to "win" instead, and the marketing department is now making it my problem. Turns out: nope. Not their angle. Their customers are losing money right and left and are unhappy about it, so at least they're trying to warn everyone.

A few days after this email, I got a frantic call from my Mom saying that someone stole $5000 out of her bank account, and the bank won't reverse the transaction. It turned out that someone called her claiming to be some antivirus software provider, convinced her to share her screen, and transferred out a chunk of money with Zelle. The email I got, and her bank, both warned that it was irreversible. And thus far, it seems unable to be reversed.

To me, this violates a fundamental assumption of banking. If someone takes your money without your consent, you typically have recourse through customer service (often works) and the legal system (almost always works, but costly). This fundamental assumption was thrown away overnight without informing anyone about it. One day, you log into your bank and maybe you can pay a bill to a known physical address. The next day, people in other countries can drain your entire bank account. It's kind of a shock; no 2FA rollout, no way to opt out, just a ticking time bomb that came out of nowhere. My bank has it; nobody ever told me about it.

My takeaway is that people aren't really ready for irreversible bank transactions. They have literally no way to understand what that even means. Sure, there's crypto, but most cryptocurrency users are pretty technical, and knew they were entering untested waters, and did so with extensive education. It has simply never been a thing in the "traditional" financial world.

The problem here, then, is that people don't associate things like "screen sharing" with taking money. They have had weird charges on their credit card before, and in those cases, called their bank and the charges were instantly forgiven. So they protect their computer with that level of security; "if I allow this screenshare, I might get a virus or worst case, something bad might happen and I'll have to make a call to my bank within 6 months after reviewing my statement". Zelle moved the goalposts; if someone uses your unlocked workstation or guesses your 4 character password, all your money is gone with no legal repercussions.

I think this is maybe fine if you opt in to be an early adopter, or your bank rolls out crypto-like payments with the requirement that you enable 2FA and have a 239847 character password every time you transfer money, but it doesn't seem like they did any of that. They just turned a safe system into an unsafe system while nobody was watching. Congress should look into that; the implementation was botched and innocent people were hurt.

(I shouldn't have to say this, but people being scammed aren't idiots. My Mom has a PhD and has written multiple scientific papers. She is a little too trusting of people claiming to help with computers and honestly doesn't understand the computery world. But I blame us, the people that make those systems and that software, not her. Ordinary people just want to send email and pay some bills in between their lives real demands. We have fucked it up severely, and the banks did a particularly bad job here. Windows Hello asking "Enter your PIN" before sending money would have stopped the screenshare attack. There's more security required to look at my Grafana dashboard that shows the humidity level of my 3D printing filament than there is around stealing $5000. That's egregiously irresponsible, and victim blaming isn't going to do anything other than ensure that the field of software dies.)