P2P Payments Fraud

04/08/19

AARP has a nice piece (featuring yours truly) about the consumer fraud risks with peer-to-peer (p2p) payment systems like Zelle and Venmo.  

Both Zelle and Venmo expressly state in their terms of use that they are not for commercial use, yet there is certainly a healthy segment of their use that is commercial.  Some of it is sort of "relational" commercial--paying a music teacher or a barber--someone whom the payor knows, so there's a social mechanism for dealing with disputes and which protects against fraud.  But there is also some use for making commercial payments outside of a relational context--paying for goods purchased on the Internet--and that is very vulnerable to fraud.  

I wish p2p payments systems would do a bit more to highlight to consumers their prohibition on commercial use, including flagging the fraud risk, but I suspect that they have no interest in doing so--while the systems disclaim commercial use, they nonetheless benefit from it, and have little reason to discourage it.  

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