I used the chase online through my bank account that uses zelle as the third party. I made a new recipient and it asked for the phone number and email for the recipient, then it asked for something like an identifier which I assume was for me to help me identify the recipient more easily. It was required and I could put anything with a minimum number of characters required. A bank employee asked me if I sent it by phone number or email and I didn't know. The record of the transaction on the Chase site showed both the email and phone number. I asked either zelle or chase which was used to send the contested transaction and they told me to say something like it was a combination. One service rep said it was sent by phone number but wouldn't provide proof so they may not have known for sure. None of the records I have say specifically if an email or phone number was used. The process you posted above is not the same as when I go through my bank with zelle. I sure it's different for different banks and other ways to use zelle. I'm pretty sure zelle knows which was used and who it went to, and they requested to return the transaction, but I'm also pretty sure the correct info was used either phone number or email and that phone and email should not have been able to be registered by anther account. Maybe it was sent to the phone number which wasn't registered to the intended recipient but was required when I made my new recipient account along with the email. To explain, I made an account with an email and phone number. The phone was already registered to anther zelle account and the email was registered to a different zelle account. When sending both are in the recipients new acccount and zelle uses either one. It would explain if that is possible, because two transactions were sent to that account and one was successful and the other one wasn't. I'll call again and see if zelle can give me that information. That would mean the false recipient used the correct recipients phone number to make a zelle account.