That’s what Charania says he did, and I ask him, “Did you ever get a phone call or reach a Venmo rep on the phone?” ![]() It worked, but here’s the existing problem: If my account had truly been hacked, Venmo offers no phone or live support you can only submit complaints through an online form. As soon as he makes the change to my primary email address, the app notifies me at my old address. Wester uses my email address to log on to Venmo with a password I provide. Because Venmo publishes my use of the app to others in my social graph, it’s not impossible that an acquaintance could take my email and guess my password. ![]() To test the change out, we teamed up with Wester to simulate an account takeover. ![]() "To enhance the security of your Venmo account, any time there is a change to your primary email address, password or phone number, we will send you an email notification." On the Venmo blog, their general manager, Michael Vaughan, explained the changes. “If customers don't feel like they're secure they won't use the application,” James Wester, mobile payments analyst at IDC, a market research firm, told ABC News. And as the media honed in on the app-maker about this and other security issues (and a day after "GMA" Investigates contacted the company), it improved that notification feature. The security issue here is that a hacker could change your password or email address and you would never know until the money was gone.Īn article detailing another hack of a Venmo user was published by Slate and got a lot of attention. One of the ways it has spread so fast amongst millennials is that it combs a user’s Facebook friends and asks if it can send them invitations to join Venmo.īut Venmo has had a run of complaints across social media, and the one rising to the top was the same one Charania complained about: users said Venmo did not email them when changes were made to their accounts. It can broadcast your transfers within the app to other people in your social graph. Venmo is incredibly social for a financial app. It took four days and I still didn’t get a response on my cellphone regarding my account until I discovered that it had been hacked and then I reached out to. “I was kind of dumbfounded that something like that could happen. “There was no notification on my phone saying ‘$2,000 on your Venmo account has been cashed out’ or that your account has been shut down,” he said. But he says this was the first he’d heard of any activity he hadn’t used the app for about a week. He says he tried to make a transfer using the app and it displayed a message saying his account had been closed and the money was gone. I had over $2,000 on there from various transfers that I received from friends and I had no way of finding out what happened to my account,” he said. But last fall the professional poker player from Chicago says his account was hacked. In making transfers and receiving them from friends, Charania had built up a surplus of cash that Venmo held in his account - kind of like an escrow account that Charania hadn’t cashed out. ![]() That’s how Mohsin Charania says he had his account set up. Tying Venmo directly to a bank account eliminates those fees. You can tie a credit card to your Venmo account for transfers, but there’s a 3 percent surcharge. It’s for peer-to-peer transfers to people you know. It’s not a direct competitor to Google Wallet or Apple Pay. Venmo isn’t for buying things from a merchant. For these digital natives, Venmo is clearly convenient, but is it safe? Roughly two-thirds of the students I asked said they used this smartphone app for the task only a handful said they write checks to pay each other back. Venmo is a smartphone app that lets you transfer money to another person’s account without fees and without credit cards. — - On a Tuesday afternoon in Berkeley, California, I asked about 20 students how they split a bill in a restaurant or pay back a roommate for shared bills.
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