Chandell Shorter has had a hard time with the money transaction app Cash App.
“On Feb 15, I was attempting to send money to my son who is in the US Navy and he’d lost his Synovus bank card.. being that there’s no Synovus in Virginia, he messaged me and said “Hey mom, I’m trying to come home, can you get cash app me some money so I can get home because I don’t have my bank card,” the mother of four says.
But her son was locked out of his cash app account. So he asked her to send it through Navy Federal. So Shorter set out to get her money back.
“I google the Cash app 800 number because you’re not going to know the number off the top of your head. The 800 number popped up with the official cash app logo. They answer the phone. “Thank you for calling square cash app, how may I help you,” says Shorter.
The customer service representative asked her a series of questions to verify her account.
“What’s your name? What’s your telephone number because cash app is linked to your telephone number and then they proceeded to tell me that they had to verify who I was by a PIN,” says Shorter.
After giving her information to the representative, they asked for her son’s account information as well, but hit a roadblock saying they couldn’t verify his account.
“Because he was locked out of it. We can’t validate the new account because you’ve never sent money to that account. So we need to validate it from a person you’ve last sent money to. They said we’re looking at your account and we see that you’ve sent money to this person. I said oh kay yeah that’s my mom. And they said okay we can process your deposit by verifying her account,” the victim said.
After verifying both sets of information, Shorter says she was placed on hold for 20 minutes. And then her heart dropped.
“I said “I just got a fraud alert from my bank, Synovus, and it’s asking me if I authorized for $974.. so I texted ‘NO’ to Synovus I didn’t authorize that. They said “oh no, you should put ‘YES’ its fine and I said “no, it’s not fine and I’m about to call 911,” the mother of four responded.
Shorter says after that $974 text she received more texts until she lost $4,668 from her account in 22 minutes.
Sgt. Wendy Thorton of the Columbus Police Department Financial Crimes says she doesn’t want anyone else to go through what Shorter did. So she offered these tips:
“Never give out any personal information. Do not give out your PIN. If you’re calling a company, they should have some other way to identify you, versus your personal pin to your bank account or a birthday or social security number. There should be some other identification you could use to identify yourself,” says Thornton.
As for Shorter, she says other than trying to get her money back, she has one purpose..
“I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.. Even if all I get out of this is to advocate and make sure no one else falls victim that’s my goal,” Shorter says
