The Great Zelle Pool Scam - All I wanted was a status symbol. What I got was a $31,000 lesson in the downside of payment apps.
The Great Zelle Pool Scam - All I wanted was a status symbol. What I got was a $31,000 lesson in the downside of payment apps.
In search of a status symbol, I wound up getting ripped off big-time. But the real scam is how America's payment apps treat their customers.
I was trying to reach Gary Kruglitz, the proprietor of Royal Palace Pools and Spas. Gary cuts a certain figure. Just a hair over 6 feet tall, wears a mustache, square wire-rimmed bifocal glasses, thin short-sleeved dress shirts through which it is occasionally possible to glimpse just the hint of nipple when the lighting is right. He has an unusually high voice for a man his size, as if a Muppet crawled down his throat one night and couldn't get out again. I wouldn't say Gary is perplexed by this modern world we find ourselves living in as much as he might not be aware it exists. Sometimes when you talk to him, he'll look up from his papers, turn in your direction, and blink, like a bird that has heard something in the underbrush.
Gary — I changed his name so I could be as honest about him and his nipples as possible — spends his days working out of his pool warehouse, in an office covered desk-to-credenza in product manuals and spa brochures and invoices produced in gold-, pink-, and white-triplicate. A man trapped in the amber of another era, the type of guy who answers his phone yellllow and says bye now when he hangs up. But at this moment, Gary was not answering his phone at all. And I was desperate to reach him, because my wife and I had paid him a deposit of $31,500 to build us a pool, and he had apparently disappeared off the face of the earth.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/L3XFo
Anyone that describes wanting a pool as a status symbol is a great mark by definition.
Eh... the entire tone of the article is tongue in cheek. The article ends with
This was not a tragedy. Out of all the kinds of money, money to build a pool is probably the very best kind of money for the world to suffer the loss of. I put the likelihood at 100% that the people who stole our money needed it more than we did.
demonstrating a reasonable level of self awareness on the author's part.
He paid 31k through a payment app...
From the blurb the author obviously considers himself very intelligent...
Dumbasses like that make the best mark, because no matter what, they can comprehend they're an idiot
In sales, there is nothing more infuriating than somebody who may (or may not) be smart, and has convinced themselves entirely wrong.
And there is nothing more perfect than someone who has decided that they absolutely love your highest margin item.
And to random people who aren't even pretending to be the person he was contracted with.
I'll give credit for having the humility to outline their experience anyways, because there are plenty of vulnerable people getting scammed for a lot of money every day. But it's pretty bad.
Big facts
Im honestly kinda pissed they still went with Gary at the end.
Yellow!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Just a hair over 6 feet tall, wears a mustache, square wire-rimmed bifocal glasses, thin short-sleeved dress shirts through which it is occasionally possible to glimpse just the hint of nipple when the lighting is right.
Gary — I changed his name so I could be as honest about him and his nipples as possible — spends his days working out of his pool warehouse, in an office covered desk-to-credenza in product manuals and spa brochures and invoices produced in gold-, pink-, and white-triplicate.
I believed the likelier scenario was that each night when the Cheryls went home, Gary climbed into an empty Jacuzzi shell with a bag of Funyuns and a worry-worn pad of invoices that served as his transitional object, pulled the thermal cover over himself, and waited in the dark with his eyes open until he could go back to the office.
About a year and a half prior, we'd walked into his office in the Berkshires, in Massachusetts — home to white folks who love the Boston Pops, farm to table, and Lyme disease — and signed a contract for Gary to build a pool in our backyard.
For years, Silicon Valley venture capitalists funded PayPal and other "peer-to-peer" payment apps as a kind of Trojan-horse play to disrupt the extremely lucrative and quasi-oligarchic banking industry.
That's because, Zelle argues, they're a platform, just like Meta and X and all the other Silicon Valley behemoths who operate by the argument that none of the bad and scary shit that takes place on the frictionless networks they built and maintain and profit from is their problem.
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