“Anna sent you $500.00 – Antique table – You now have $500.00 in your Venmo account.”
Free money! I had plenty of ideas for how to budget an unexpected $500. (Venmo, a digital wallet app owned by Paypal, took a seller transaction fee of 1.9% plus another 10 cents, so my $500 was actually $490.40.) But I had neither possessed nor sold an antique table.
My scam sense was tingling. Anna had sent me the money by accident — or had she? Wouldn’t you double-check someone’s phone number before sending them that much money?
I looked into it, and found a Better Business Bureau warning about this “money sent by accident” scam from 2020.
I looked up Venmo’s FAQs on what to do. At the time, Venmo said I could “simply send the payment back to that user.” Venmo has since updated its guidance: The page says to contact Venmo support if you receive money from someone you don’t know.
Sorin Mihailovici, the editor-in-chief of Scam Detector, said if I’d sent the money back, I might have found myself out $500.
He explained: The scammer steals credit card numbers — which can be purchased in bulk on the dark web — and attaches those cards to accounts on digital wallet apps like Venmo, Cashapp and Zelle. Then, they “accidentally” send money to hundreds or thousands of people at once, whose phone numbers were similarly acquired in some back-alley of the internet. A subsequent request to get the money back goes out to all the targets. Some of those people will ignore it, but others…
