Tech Support: How to protect yourself from Venmo scams
Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley joins the Yahoo Finance Live panel with today’s Tech Support: How to protect yourself from Venmo scams.
Video Transcript
- Oh, and the size of Venmo's network continues to grow. Makes it pretty easy for people to pay friends and others. There have been scammers who have taken notice and increasingly come up with some interesting ways to scam you out of your money. And for this week's Tech Support, Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley is walking us through ways to protect yourself. Stan.
DAN HOWLEY: That's right. I'm in my hacker gear, as you can see. You cannot see me across the internet. Maybe you can. Anyway, basically, I was using my phone, let's say to do research for work a.k.a. scrolling Instagram and talking to my friends.
And I received a text message in the middle of the day. And it said, essentially, that I had received $13.50-- I think we have a shot of it the text message itself-- from someone that I did not know. And the gist of these kinds of scams is that what they do is, see that little bit.ly link, they want you to click that link.
You're going to say, oh, I got money from so-and-so, let me view you the information. Click the link and it could install malware onto your device. Or it could take you to a website where they ask you to verify your identity so that you can get into this fake account for your money.
And I obviously did not send money to this person because I was not even actively sending money at that point, so I did not click the link. But this is sort of a series of scams that we're seeing across the web. And a lot of them are showing up in text messages. Some show up in emails.
And really the idea here is to get you to click on a link and have them steal your info. So some of them are about offering to increase your money. Some of them will say that they're selling something. Or when you're selling something to a stranger, some of them are about buying something from strangers.
And some of them are when someone pretends to be your friend and request money. And so the ones about selling really you have to watch out. If you happen to be selling a product and then they say that they'll send you the money and then pull it right back, then they get the product and you're out of money.
There's somewhere you will actually receive real money into your Venmo account. And then what they'll do is the scammer will contact you and say, can you please send that money back, it was an accident. But it turns out that money was actually sent to you using a stolen credit card.
And so when you do send that money back to them, the money will actually come out of your account because the credit card money, the original, will then be canceled by the credit card company itself. So you could be out $200, $500, whatever amount of dollars. So really the key here for all of these scams is if you do receive a text message or an email from anyone saying that you've sent money or you are sending money, skip the text message, go directly to the app itself.
In my instance where it said that I had sent someone money, I went right to the email. I did not click the link. Just for this article that I'm working on and for this piece, I did go to the link or attempt to go to the link in my web browser on my desktop.
And it was a bit.ly link. And then bit.ly had already flagged it saying that it was a malicious link and that they had deactivated it. You can also contact customer support. If someone ends up sending you money, they will take care of it from there. This way that you don't have to worry about losing money from your own account in the instance that it is some kind of scam.
And then if you receive a weird request from a friend, someone that is pretending to be a friend, you don't always know. So they may change their profile photo to look like your friend, they may change their name to look like your friends. They'll do anything they can to get you and your money separated.
If you do get some kind of weird request from a friend asking for an exorbitant amount of money, even a small amount of money, reach out to them. If you didn't go out to dinner with them or you didn't go out to a bar with them and there's no reason for them to be asking for cash, text them call them. Find out why they're asking that.
And that's really the best way to make sure that you stay safe from these scams. And they are on the upswing. So just remember to be careful out there.
- Yeah, or maybe too, I mean, I suppose the other thing there would be to make sure that if you have friends that you do pay, to friend them on Venmo, that's a good way to check and make sure that they're still there. But you raise a good point. I mean, the fake accounts could pop up and throw you for a loop there too. How much responsibility do you think is being placed on Venmo itself, I guess, for policing that?
DAN HOWLEY: Well, they actually have a website for dealing with scams. And the customer support is really good with that. So they're aware of these issues. And they're trying to tamp down on them as much as possible.
The ones where you get these kind of text messages like I did, where it says I sent someone money, that can't be Venmo's problem because it's coming from a third-party text message. So really, that's out of their control. But since I use Venmo all the time-- I rarely use anything else-- that's where the assumption automatically comes from.
And since Venmo's so popular-- I'm sure it is for a lot of people that are using these kind of cash sending apps. So it is something to definitely be on the lookout for. Because they can get you and then take any kind of amount of money they want from you as easy as possible. So just as you're careful with your emails, you have to be careful what your text messages as well.
- Dan Howley, bringing us the latest there to protect everybody in this week's Tech Support. Appreciate that, man. You take the hood off the glasses off, now his hacker life is over. Back to normal. Good guy, Dan Howley.
