I've been trying to figure out if this is a known scam and wasn't able to find anything, so I figure I should share my experience. I was scammed $50 for a concert ticket on Saturday. That scam itself wasn't especially interesting. I mean, the dude did photoshop some stuff that convinced me he was a real person who had these tickets, so it was decent, but ultimately vanilla and 100% my bad.
In any case, I wanted to call Zelle to see about getting my money back and here's where I almost fell victim to what I think is a much more sophisticated scam. I type "Zelle phone number" into my Google Chrome browser, and without thinking about it much, click on the first result. I verify that I'm looking at the actual Zelle website, I see a phone number and the words Customer Support, so I dial them up.
From here, the rest of this story is probably very familiar to folks... they ask me to share my screen on whatsapp, send an apple gift card to myself and then pull up the email. They tell me they're trying to verify that I'm able to receive payments at this email. I was finding everything more and more suspicious the whole time. Each time, I'm going back to the URL where I'd gotten the phone number from, thinking I just need to make sure it's from the actual Zelle website.
I finally realize that this cannot possibly be the methodology Zelle customer support would ever use — a bit too late for my pride, but just in time to not get scammed. But it's only at this point that I finally take a closer look at the URL I got this phone number from. The rules of this subreddit don't seem to let me put it in the body of this text, and it's too long to fit into the title of the post, so I guess I'll post it in the comments if that's ok with the mods.
So what's shocking about this particular scam to me is these guys input this into Zelle's search bar, generated this URL, then made this URL a sponsored google post. They correctly figured idiots like me would pull up the first result they could find as long as it's on the actual Zelle website, call that number, and do anything they say as we're absolutely convinced we're actually talking to their customer support.
Lesson learned! Hope this helps other folks, and hopefully Google does something to prevent people from using sponsored search results for scams.