People lost over $76K handing phones to scammers on NY streets last year, cops say

The NYPD says scammers stole more than $76,000 from dozens of people who turned over their phones to strangers in Manhattan and Brooklyn last year, and is warning New Yorkers not to fall for the same ruse.

According to fliers that police officers handed out in SoHo this week, scammers typically start by asking victims for donations for activities like sports teams, school activities or non-profits. They request the money to be sent via apps like Venmo, Cash App or Zelle — but then tell the victim they didn’t receive the donation, and offer to “help” by borrowing the victim’s phone, the NYPD warns.

That’s when, the NYPD says, the scammers transfer large sums of money from the victims’ accounts to their own.

Late last year, the department collected details on a series of such scams. In a period from Jan. 11 to Nov. 19, it said, the NYPD took reports of 39 incidents where scammers approached victims and stole anywhere from $928 to $3,500. The victims ranged between the ages of 19 and 39 — with 35 of them being women.

Venmo, Zelle and Cash App all have pages on their websites describing common scams and how to avoid them, though most of of their warnings involve online scams rather than ones that happen in person.

“Scams do not originate in payment networks; they start well before the point the consumer initiates a payment,” Zelle spokesperson Jane Khodos told Gothamist. “These unfortunate situations are precisely why Zelle believes the best approach to solving this problem is to focus on the criminals trying to coerce hardworking Americans into sending money, and that government, law enforcement and private industry need to come together to prevent these crimes from happening in the first place.”

She stressed that in 2023, 99.5% of transactions using its service were completed without a report of a scam.

In one of the New York incidents, on Feb. 26, 2024, swindlers approached a 23-year-old woman on West 28th Street and Broadway in Manhattan and wound up transferring $2,500 from her account, the NYPD said. In another on Oct. 16, a 28-year-old woman was robbed of $3,500 by scammers using the same approach.

The NYPD says the scams are most common in the summer, when the weather is hot and more people are outside.

Police said they believe most of the people carrying out the scam are from New Jersey, and they targeted people who were hanging out in parks and courtyards, but they didn’t elaborate on any possible connections between suspects. They made several arrests last year in connection with some of the incidents, including three individuals aged 19 to 21 years old from Jersey City. One person arrested was a 15-year-old boy.