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It’s Easy to Get Scammed on Venmo

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1–10 of 63 posts

Re: It’s Easy to Get Scammed on Venmo

#3
I a big fan of venmo, but it's crazy that they don't make it clear that your venmo balance can we reversed. There should be a "pending balance."

Also they should make it more clear about which types of payments are acceptable (though this is more of a complaint about TOS in general).

Re: It’s Easy to Get Scammed on Venmo

#5
Wow, I use Venmo all the time, never even thought the TOS would have something like this in it. Now I only use it among friends I know well. And any craigslist type transaction I've always done strictly with cash only. But this is definitely good to know though. Venmo needs to make this clear and make the reversal process much more involved, it seems it'd be really easy to pull this scam off.

Re: It’s Easy to Get Scammed on Venmo

#6

I a big fan of venmo, but it's crazy that they don't make it clear that your venmo balance can we reversed. There should be a "pending balance." Also they should make it more clear about which types of payments are acceptable (though this is more of a complaint about TOS in general).

That's a problem with PayPal in general. I got scammed once because someone paid for something of mine with a stolen account, and the money was removed from my account almost two months after the transaction. I was rather alarmed, because it was long past the date after which I could deposit the money into my bank account, so I assumed by then that it was "safe".

Re: It’s Easy to Get Scammed on Venmo

#9
What I find interesting is that I don't know anyone here in Australia that uses these payment platforms. I wonder if that's because bank-to-bank transfers are so quick and easy these days? Most of the big banks even have ways of sending _cash_ to other people, to withdraw from any of that bank's ATMs with a code and no card.

Anyway, the issue Venmo has here is similar to what banks also have to deal with: in theory you can reverse a transaction before it's cleared when sending money between accounts. That said, it's quite a bit more difficult I'd assume, and perhaps a lot of people who would otherwise be happy with scamming those out of money on third-party systems would think twice about doing so when a bank is involved. Interesting stuff, and it seems most startups who try and break into these sorts of markets have to learn all the hard lessons the big companies did years ago, which sucks for consumers. On the other hand, the incumbents are usually so slow moving and painful, I applaud those who attempt it.

Re: It’s Easy to Get Scammed on Venmo

#10
> Finally on Jan. 22, from Eran Kimchi, Venmo’s head of fraud, whom Movassaghi emailed directly in a final attempt to recover his money and alert the company to what he saw as a dangerous and pervasive scam: “Venmo has a complete understanding of the scam plot you fell victim to … there is nothing Venmo can do to comfort you. … You made an innocent mistake, and you paid for it.”

That's certainly one way of dealing with your customers. Remind me not to touch Venmo again in the future.

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