Great to have you here on the Clark Howard Show where it's all about you and your wallet.

I mean, you'd learn ideas to me so you can save more and spend less.

And don't let anyone ever rip you off, speaking of which coming up in just a few minutes.

Another online scam that used to be just during the Christmas season.

Getting people now is an all season scam.

I'll fill you in on how to protect yourself.

And coming up later, you know, it feels like we're in an always lose battle with our identity, our security, our passwords and all that.

I want to tell you there are a number of major sites that are coming up with better ways to protect you.

I want to tell you how some of the bigs are offering you methods that require a couple extra steps, but will more easily protect your account and your identity.

So I want to talk to you about something that came up first last fall.

And it involved a caller who was scammed out of money and they ended up sending the crook money using the Venmo app.

And Venmo is a fantastic app to use if you want to send money to a friend or family member only only.

So criminals knowing that they get money deposited very quickly from you are conning people and descending a money using the Venmo app with you as an unsuspecting consumer, not being aware that Venmo and the bank competitor product that's called Zell, but many banks use their own branding for Zell.

That these apps are not set up where you have any kind of normal consumer protections when you deal with the stranger.

So as criminals have stepped up their attempts to steal from people conning you into paying with the Venmo app more and more people are suffering like our caller from last year.

Sending money to a crook realizing that they got taken and then having no recourse, no way to get your money back because the idea of these is these are electronic funds transfers and Congress never designed any consumer protections whatsoever for this area because when Congress used to care about what happened to people.

This didn't exist in more recent years and it's why debit cards have vastly inferior I can't even call them protections there's virtually nothing meaningful for debit cards completely different than credit cards because now banks so rule Washington and the corridors and all the money they spread around to the members of the house in the Senate.

Nobody lends an ear anymore to the thought of how to protect their actual voters their actual constituents and so when you use one of these apps where you can send money to somebody else for free from your checking account what's missing from that is any any any consumer protection at all.

So what you've got to know is that if you're dealing with a seller of anything and they're trying to get you to pay them with Venmo or sell know that you don't do it don't do it if you go to dinner with friends and one person wants to pick up the check temporarily so they can earn points on a card or cash back or whatever and you're squaring up.

With the person who paid for your share of a meal or let's say people are going together to buy a gift for somebody for the birthday and one person goes the store and they buy it and then everybody else needs to reimburse them that's when you use Venmo but when it comes to anything involved with an unknown third party you use a payment app like Venmo.

So well with unbelievable risk now there's another thing I talked about last year I want to reiterate and this is the scam involving Venmo and sell where somebody will say their phones out of battery or their phone was stolen or whatever they need to make a call to someone and they take your phone and before you even realize it they set up a transfer of them for themselves if they see Venmo or Z.

They sell on your phone they set up a cash transfer and you even realize they've done it and then they go ahead and they make a call and you don't realize till later when there's no money in your checking account that you got hoodwinked by somebody when you were trying to be helpful anytime somebody asked to use your phone please remember dial the call for them yourself and then hand them the phone and that way they will not be able to do it.

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