Greg's Corner

Your Venmo friend may not be your friend

By Greg Collier

Payment and wallet apps like Venmo have been a great convenience for consumers. They can allow you to make payments to friends or make purchases without having to carry cash or a card that could be easily lost. As a modern society, we seem to be more protective of our phones than our methods of payment. However, we also sometimes seem to forego security over convenience, which has led to a number of these apps being used in scams. Venmo is not a stranger to these scams, but a new scam has emerged which may have Venmo looking at one of its features.

In our opinion, the major drawback to using Venmo is that by default, your purchases and transactions are available on a public feed. That means anyone who knows your Venmo username can see who you’ve paid and where you’ve shopped. Scammers are well aware of this and are now creating Venmo accounts that look exactly like one of your friends’ accounts. The scammers will then contact their targets asking for money, and once that money leaves your Venmo account, it’s almost impossible to retrieve. Why this public feed is considered a feature on Venmo is beyond us.

There are steps you can take to make your Venmo account more secure. The first thing you should do is make all your transactions private, which you can find the instructions for here. The second thing you can do is verify with your friends if they’re the ones actually asking you for money. That may require an awkward conversation depending on the situation, but that’s better than losing your money. You should only use apps like Venmo with people you know and verified merchants. Anybody else could be a security threat. Enable two-factor authentication to keep opportunists out of your account if they become in possession of your phone. Lastly, if you have the ability to do so, link a credit card to your account, as it will give you more protection than these apps offer on their own.