How I Scammed Myself on Venmo

…and sent $1,500 to a stranger.

I owed a friend of mine $1,500. Fortunately, she had Venmo.

Venmo is one of the world’s greatest inventions. It’s a quick, simple, secure way for everyday people to zap money to each other: to split a check, tip a musician, reimburse for expenses or kindness. (The name comes from vendere, Latin for “to sell,” and “mo” for “mobile.”)

And it’s free. For payments from your bank to the other person’s, Venmo doesn’t take a cut.

No wonder we pay each other around $250 billion a year with Venmo. The big mystery is why it took so long for anyone to come up with Venmo in the first place.

Anyway. My friend—let’s call her Maura Wilde—sent me her Venmo address, which I’ll refer to as @mtwilde. So a few days ago, exhausted on a book-tour flight, I figured I’d settle up with her.

I opened the Venmo site on my laptop, logged in, and typed mtwilde into the search box. Maura popped up instantly in the results. I even recognized her face in her profile photo. (Or thought I did; the photo was about six pixels across.)

I entered $1,500 as the amount, added a description, and hit Pay.

As always, Venmo interrupted to suggest that I enter the last four digits of Maura’s phone number to make sure I had the right person.

Well, crud; I didn’t have her number. And I was on a plane. And I was really tired. So I blew past it and sent the money.

You can probably see where this is going.

I emailed Maura to let her know that I’d Venmoed her, and sat back to accept her warm thanks.

But instead, she replied that she hadn’t gotten it. “Are you sure you Venmoed the right person?” she asked.

My blood ran cold, my brain fizzed, and my stomach dropped to the center of the earth.

I checked the app. Well, crap crap crap crap!! Somehow, I’d sent the payment to @mtwild, not @mtwilde. Maybe it was autocorrect shenanigans, or maybe I just never typed the final E because (a) she’d popped up first in the list and (b) I was sleep-deprived.

Either way, I had just sent $1,500 to a total stranger.

My name is David, and I’m a freaking idiot.

Finding help

I searched Venmo’s Support site. Good news: There’s actually a page called, “I accidentally paid a stranger on Venmo.”

Bad news: That page says three different things, which lie at three different spots along the panic axis:

• “Payments on Venmo generally can’t be canceled once they’ve reached the recipient’s Venmo account.”

• “If you accidentally sent a payment to a stranger, contact our Support team, and we’ll do our best to help.”

• “If you sent a Venmo payment to an unregistered phone number or email address, you should be able to ‘take back’ the pending payment.”

Well, which is it? It kind of matters!

A big part of the mystery seems to be how long it takes the money to reach the other person. If it’s instantaneous, then I’m out $1,500. If there’s a delay, maybe there’s time to cancel it in mid-flight.

But Venmo’s help pages couldn’t even agree on how long a payment takes!

• One page says: “When you send (or receive) a payment on Venmo, the payment should reach the recipient’s Venmo account right away.”

• Another page says that payments “typically complete within one business day, but can take up to 3 business days.”

Well, OK. Let’s assume the worst: That I sent the money to the wrong person, and it was instantaneous.

Pay me back?

Back to the Help page: “If you accidentally sent a payment to someone you know, you can send that person a charge request for the same amount so that they can pay you back. Include a note explaining the mistake.”

Worth a shot! I sent @mtwild a Request to pay me back and explained the mistake. Actually, I asked for only $1,470 back. I invited her to keep the $30 extra as a thank-you for her honesty.

My worry, though, was that she would find all of this super scammy. Wouldn’t you?! First she sees a random payment for $1,500 from a total stranger, and then she gets a request to send money? For a slightly different amount? It had SCAM written all over it.

So in the request description box, I included my phone number and email address. If she were at all interested in getting to the bottom of this, at least I could explain the situation to her.

But when I clicked Request, I got the error shown here at right:

Oh NO!!! Venmo doesn’t let you include any contact information!

I tried editing the description to include only one contact detail (phone, email, website); no go. In fact, Venmo wouldn’t even let me do that thing where you code your address, like “it’s my first initial, last name, at gmail.”

If I were going to send any message to her, I would have to leave out any contact info. So that’s what I did.

Shocker: She declined the request for payment.

Just my luck, right? Of all the strangers in the world, I’d picked a greedy one. I’d sent money to some scumbag with compromised morals and no empathy.

I mean, if I had gotten $1,500 out of the blue, I’d have had instant pity for the poor soul who’d made an honest mistake.

But not for @mtwild! No, no! For her, it was just: “It’s mine now! Go to hell!”

I was really losing it now, sweating, shifting, typing in frenetic bursts. The guy next to me on the plane must have thought I had some kind of condition.

Cherish support

I had one last card to play: the “Contact our Support team” option.

Once I figured out how to escape the warm, unhelpful embrace of Venmo’s AI chatbot (by typing secret passcode “agent”), I found myself chatting with Cherish. She’s a real person—an empathetic person.

She found the transaction in the system immediately. But she didn’t do anything to fix the problem.

That’s because it was already fixed.

If you can believe it, @mtwild had declined the original payment!

I was happy about the money, but I felt terrible for my assumptions about @mtwild. I had had her all wrong! She was an honest, good person! So honest, in fact, that she had instantly declined the original $1,500! I just hadn’t visited my Transactions list to see it.

And that, of course, is why she’d also declined my request for reimbursement of $1,470. She’d already negated the mistake. We were already even!

I felt flooded with gratitude and relief. I needed to thank her. I needed to tell her that she’s an angel, a bastion of integrity.

This time, I’d send her some money deliberately. I wanted to gift her that $30, accompanied by an effusive note of gratitude.

But there was one more twist to the @mtwild story.

Now, she no longer showed up when I searched for her. She no longer existed on Venmo. I couldn’t message or pay her.

She’d blocked me.

Epilogue

My $1,500 was back in my account. I paid the correct Maura—@mtwilde with an E, last four digits 7388—and everything was fine.

This was not, by the way, a situation of Venmo not being secure. (Some people think it could do better.) Venmo had tried to steer me right, with the phone-number thing, and I’d trampled past it.

My takeaway, obviously, is that from now on, I’ll enter the damn phone number every time I pay a new person. If I don’t know it, I’ll go get it.

As for @mtwild: At first, I was hurt that she’d blocked me. I wanted her to know that I’m actually a good guy!

But in re-reading Venmo’s support site, I found a page called “Payment from a Stranger.” Its advice: “You may want to block the person who paid you, to prevent them from doing so again.”

It was nothing personal after all. Good old @mtwild had just been following Venmo’s advice!

So here’s to you, @mtwild, wherever you are. I want you to know that I think the world of you. You’re an honest and empathetic person; you even follow instructions.

Thank you for your understanding and kindness, and may all your transactions be profitable.