Now that Early Warning Services plans to
The reimbursements are a
Separately, National Westminster Bank, or NatWest, is taking a more hands-on approach to fraud by inviting consumers into its branches to play a board game themed around financial security.
There's a clear need for more consumer education. Criminals stole more than $8.8 billion across all forms of payment last year, according to Early Warning.
Ricci, who rose to fame after starring as Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family at the age of 9, is tackling the scams as a fictional member of the
The character appears in three YouTube videos spanning about 10 minutes combined. In the vignettes, produced by Vox Media, Ricci exposes fake job ads requiring a deposit, romance scams where an apparent paramour needs thousands of dollars urgently and hoaxes where criminals pose as law enforcement agents demanding immediate repayment of allegedly overdue taxes.
"I'll show you how to report the scam to the FTC; we'll go over whichever bank or payment platform you used also," one of Ricci's fellow detectives tells a P2P scam victim.
Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, PNC, Truist, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo — along with thousands of other banks and credit unions that support Zelle — continually warn against scams in print and electronic customer communications. Most require users to double-confirm new payees when sending funds via Zelle, but many consumers seem oblivious to these warnings.
Fun and games
Last week, NatWest announced the rollout of a board game called All Mod Cons that aims to teach people about scams and how to avoid them. The game, which NatWest is touting on British social media with a video featuring TV star Jeff Brazier, is available at some of NatWest's 960 branches across Great Britain.
London-based NatWest said 13% of British adults have lost money to scams in the last 12 months and 70% report being targeted by bank and P2P scams three times a week on average.
While NatWest is one of Britain's four largest banks in terms of total transactions cleared,
The task of enlightening consumers about their fraud risks from digital banking services is complicated by the fact that the abundance of online entertainment options has made it harder to reach the masses in a single channel such as a TV spot, experts say.
For example, while Early Warning's new anti-scam videos are well-produced, they may contain more detail than necessary for average consumers, said Patrick Rafferty, founder of RaffertyWeiss Media, a Bethesda, Maryland-based video production company that has created numerous public service campaigns over the last 20 years for the federal government, AARP and many nonprofit organizations.
"The content is good, but the execution is a bit campy," Rafferty said, noting that an effective way to reach consumers today with complex messages is via animated videos in a tutorial style.
Short messages are most effective, whereas building up drama takes more time than most consumers are willing to spend, according to Rafferty.
"Breaking content into smaller pieces makes it more watchable," he said. Rafferty's firm recently produced an animated 58-second video for AARP describing how to spot a student loan repayment program scam.
Early Warning is supporting the Ricci videos with a campaign running through March 31, 2024, that aims to reach 14 million consumers through internet channels including Vox.com, The Verge, Thrillist and PopSugar, Zelle said. Zelle and Ricci's own social media accounts will also promote the campaign, alongside a microsite featuring interactive tools and quizzes for consumers to learn more about scams.
Media blitz
These moves underscore the growing pressure banks in many markets face as scams become more aggressive. Since Zelle's launch, Early Warning has urged users to send funds only to friends and family, a policy also enforced by rival P2P services including PayPal's Venmo and Block's Cash App.
Early Warning has used other tools to educate consumers about scams. Last year the firm
The Federal Trade Commission continuously warns consumers about P2P scams through multiple public channels, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation ran its own online public service campaign in October, warning consumers about scams where criminals impersonate bank personnel or representatives of corporations or the government.
"If the number [of a suspicious text message] is a full 10-digit phone number, then it's a scam. Most banking institutions will only text you from a short 5-digit code and will never include a link," the FBI advised.
Meanwhile, Zelle's own fame may dilute the message. The current top movie on Netflix, a body-swap comedy called "Family Switch" starring Jennifer Garner and Ed Helms, features a Zelle cameo. The son of Garner's character offers to use Zelle to pay a planetarium employee to fix a telescope.
"Hell yeah, I take Zelle," the employee replies.
An Early Warning spokesperson said Zelle's appearance in the film — which does not carry any security warning about sending money to strangers — was not product placement.
No single educational effort will reach everyone, so the only practical approach is to push this content out through every reasonable channel, said Kelly Paxton, a former fraud expert and embezzlement analyst who hosts PinkCollarCrime.com to help businesses and consumers battle fraud.
"Consumers have optimism bias — they don't think fraud or scams will happen to them — so education needs to be ongoing," Paxton said. "There's so much content now and it's fragmented across so many demographic groups that financial services firms must pay attention to different media for different age groups with the theme of education as prevention."
