How do I spot a Facebook Marketplace Zelle payment scam?

How to spot the Facebook Marketplace scam

• You are asked to send money in order to receive money. That inversion is the scam in one line: no payment network makes the person being paid pay first.
• The instruction arrives by email. Zelle runs inside your bank's own app, so a real payment lands in your bank balance. It does not email you a task to complete.
• The sender is a lookalike, not zellepay.com. Read the domain after the @, not the display name, which anyone can set to "Zelle Support".
• A business upgrade is being arranged by the buyer. Zelle for small business is switched on by your own bank if you want it, and no version of it is unlocked by a customer or requires you to reimburse one.
• The buyer sends "proof" of a payment that your bank app does not show. Only your bank balance settles this; a screenshot is a picture.
• The amount is higher than your asking price and you are asked to return the difference. Overpay-and-refund is the same trick wearing a different hat.
• The pressure is about speed: confirm the email, send the fee back, do it before the transfer reverses. Urgency exists to stop you opening your banking app and seeing nothing there.
• They want to leave Marketplace immediately for text or email, where there is no record and no reporting button.

What to do now

1. Open your bank app and look at the balance. If the payment is not there, it does not exist, whatever any email says.
2. Send nothing back. Once you transfer, you are the one who authorised it, and that is the distinction the whole dispute will turn on.
3. Report it to your bank or credit union first, not to Zelle. Zelle runs through them and they decide reimbursement. Zelle draws the line between fraud, meaning an unauthorised payment, which typically qualifies for reimbursement, and a scam, where you were persuaded to send it; Zelle states certain impostor scams also qualify.
4. Zelle's own support line is 1-844-428-8542, open 8am to 10pm ET, seven days a week.
5. File with the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov and the FBI's IC3 at ic3.gov. Zelle points people to both, and the reports are what get a repeat buyer account shut down.
6. Keep the conversation inside Marketplace and report the buyer there, so the next seller sees a flagged account instead of a fresh one.