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How to avoid getting scammed on Zelle
With users sending and receiving money directly into their bank accounts, Zelle is ripe for the scamming
Scams have become a big part of the online world. From ransomware to simple phishing scams, fraudsters constantly evolve unique ways to separate you from your money or personal information. If you want to be sure you're protected, always be on the lookout for suspicious behavior, particularly when it comes to payment apps like Zelle.
WhatsApp is pushing hard to get a slice of that money transfer pie, introducing mobile person-to-person payments in India and Brazil. And what's better than sending your friend a fast food combo's worth of money to cover that time you left your wallet in the car? Well, lots of things. But getting a tiny, tiny portion of that payment back in credit is probably one of them.
Venmo is introducing new fees, and you're not going to like them
Fees for more goods and services will go into effect next month
Venmo is a popular user-to-user money transfer service, which gained a lot of ground for being easy to use and essentially free. But ever since PayPal bought the company back in 2013, the writing was on the wall for the first part of that. Soon the latter will start to look more like the former, with a series of increasing fees for some money transfers beginning next month.
Square just bought Tidal and your guess is as good as ours as to why
The two companies share a love of really boring logos
Square, the company that makes those little portable payment machines you use when you're in a small restaurant or paying for a caricature, is buying Tidal, that music streaming service that's obsessed with audio quality. If it seems like an odd match, consider that musicians often need to get paid in non-traditional ways—that's how it's being pitched in the official announcement, anyway.
Google Fi ends 60-day late-payment grace period introduced after COVID-19
Google has apparently decided the pandemic is over
Many cell carriers around the world temporarily boosted speeds, forgave late fees, and/or delayed payments as millions of people lost their jobs at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though the global economy hasn't quite recovered yet, and some U.S. states have unemployment rates as high as 16%, Google Fi announced it is returning to pre-COVID payment due dates and data limits.
Google Pay gains support for 29 new banks and financial institutions in 22 countries (Update: 11 more banks)
Because carrying a wallet is so over
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Google Pay is compatible with a wide range of cards from various institutions around the world. Sadly, there are still a bunch of them that don't work with the contactless payment service. Thankfully, it is constantly gaining support for new banks and financial institutions, including the below 29, spread across 22 countries.
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Google Pay already supports a plethora of credit cards from a multitude of banks all over the world, but there are still many institutions left that don't work with Google's payment system. It's great to see that the number of compatible banks is rising internationally, and today, we can report a whopping 62 newly added banks — though about half of these are savings banks located in Denmark.
Although Google Pay is gaining support for transit and boarding passes, the service is also frequently adding new financial institutions to its list of partners. Since the end of July, 16 more banks and payment services across Europe, Canada, and Japan, have made their way to Google Pay. Here's the full list below:
UPI is the leading digital payment platform in India, which lets users make transfers directly from one bank account to another. It's already used for more than 900 million transactions a month, such as utility bill payments, mobile recharges, in-store purchases, and more. From now on, Indian users will also be able to buy content from the Play Store using the payment solution.
Much like the desktop site, the PayPal mobile app has always supported sending money to friends, but it was a secondary feature. With the growing popularity of peer-to-peer payment apps like Venmo (which PayPal also owns), PayPal has decided to redesign the app and place a greater emphasis on sending money to friends.
Manually entering your payment information every time you check out on a new site (or app) is incredibly annoying. In fact, Google says virtual shopping carts are abandoned twice as often on mobile for that very reason. To help alleviate this problem, it looks like Google is working on a PayPal-like payment API that works on desktop and mobile.
Some users signed up to the Google app beta channel have been receiving an unusual "alpha" release of v6.13 update. It's not entirely clear if this was meant to find its way into the wild, and judging by many inoperable and buggy issues, I suspect it wasn't. All the same, it's out and contains some pretty interesting things. To begin with, this version enables some features that had previously been seen in testing like a page of recent search topics and lite mode. There is also a process to add payment information for use with Google Assistant. Diving into a teardown brings back some previously seen features and adds a couple of new ones to the list.
If the presentations at Google I/O last month were any indication, Android Pay is growing quite quickly. Several new features were announced, but most were still only demos, not available to the public. A fresh update to the Android Pay app came out yesterday and a teardown reveals a few of those key features are either ready to launch or getting closer. There's also work being done on a map that will show merchants in close proximity that accept Android Pay, and a shortcut already showing up that will direct users to apps with Android Pay integration.
So your church group decides to pay for a new well somewhere that needs it. You'll have to collect $20 from each person, then bundle it all up and make sure no one's welching. That's a considerable amount of work for a big group, not to mention a lot of awkward conversations - you can only hear "I left my wallet at home" so many times before you snap, earning a scornful look from the deacon and a thrashing from your grandma after Sunday pot roast.
Lyft, the ride-sharing service that is more than happy to have someone drive you around town, will now let you pay for said trip using Google Wallet.
Samsung presentations always include a litany of buzzwords and redundant features, some of which are meaningless or borrowed directly from Google and Android, while others point to bigger aspirations. Today's announcement for the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge introduced a new feature called Samsung Pay, a direct competitor to Google Wallet and Apple Pay. Even though this is just one more product that attempts to have consumers replace their credit cards with a phone, it carries a distinct advantage over NFC-based alternatives: it also works with traditional credit card readers.
Google has had a fairly rough time convincing consumers to use Wallet for in-store purchases. However, with the recent acquisition of Softcard's "technology" alongside plans to preload Wallet on Android phones from most major US carriers, Google is putting its weight behind a renewed effort to be a major player at brick-and-mortar locations. Amidst rumors that Google still has something else to announce at I/O, Ars Technica received a tip that a brand new payment platform called Android Pay will be announced at the conference.
PayPal's Here direct sale and money transfer service is an admirable rival to the similar Square, and before today its standard Android app was perfectly fine. But you can't deny that it looked a little... iPhoney. Thankfully the second release of the PayPal Here app brings the user interface more in line with other polished Android apps, and throws a little expanded functionality in for good measure.
Ready for another Google Now rumor? We've already seen evidence of contact-based reminders reliant on your proximity with another person, and "inferred events," whereby Now would pluck mentions of meetings or other appointments from your conversations to automatically create calendar entries. This time, we have something just as useful - a new bill pay card and interface, evidently headed for Google Now.