A really good product often gets used in ways the creator hadn’t foreseen or intended. Consider the Microplane, for example, which was meant for woodworking but became an indispensable kitchen tool. Similarly, Venmo was launched as a quick and easy way to exchange funds with friends and family, but — because of its convenience — rapidly became a popular option for buying and selling as well.
The PayPal-owned service quickly got on board, creating a merchant program for on- and offline sellers and (more recently) allowing personal users to designate transactions as purchases. The catch is that your buyer can’t send you money without your username. But is it safe to give someone your Venmo username? Let’s look at the possibilities.
Is Venmo Safe?
The first question is whether Venmo is a safe platform to use, in a general sense, and the answer to that is a pretty solid “yes.” As you’d expect from a PayPal subsidiary, Venmo encrypts its data for security: not just about your individual transactions, but also any user data it needs to retain in order to provide service or for regulatory reasons. There’s also a process for signing out of your account if your phone is lost or stolen, so it can’t be used to loot your account.
But while Venmo is safe, on the whole, any meaningful discussion of the platform has to add a couple of asterisks to the word “safe.” Any place where money changes hands will attract its share of scammers, and sadly, you’ll find no shortage of Venmo scammers. Some operate on the platform itself, while others pose as Venmo to mount phishing expeditions and phone or text scams. Venmo itself maintains a list of common scams you’ll encounter.
A second potential risk for users is that Venmo, like many medications, is safe “when used as directed.” The problem is that buying and selling isn’t what it was designed for, and adapting it for use as a payments tool — rather than just shifting money around your personal circle — creates vulnerabilities that scammers can exploit. Getting your Venmo username is just one of those.
Is it Safe to Give Someone Your Venmo Username?
It’s pretty safe to give your username to the people Venmo was created for: friends, family, coworkers, and others you know personally. That’s the “when used as directed” part we spoke of a moment ago. Unfortunately, if you want to buy and sell on a personal level, it means giving your username to people you don’t know.
It’s important to stress that this isn’t necessarily a problem. Most of the people who respond to your ad on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace (or any similar platform) aren’t scammers. They’re just somebody who happens to have a need for the item you’re selling. But if they are a scammer, there are a number of ways they could potentially misuse your username. These include:
- Impersonating you: Once a Venmo account has been set up, it’s easy to change the username. A scammer could use stolen ID to set up a fake account, then change the username and profile to closely mirror yours. At that point, they’re all set up to impersonate you to your friends and family, and hit them up for funds.
- Credential stuffing: Criminals who have your username can use a simple “bot” to try logging into your account with a list of passwords that have been exposed in previous breaches (it’s a technique called “credential stuffing”). Most of us use the same handful of passwords across all of our accounts, and this is exactly why it’s such a bad habit (Pro tip: change all your passwords to strong ones, and then let a password management app do the remembering for you).
- Phishing for your login credentials: Scammers may try to trick you into giving up your own login information. To be clear, this can happen with or without your username, though if they already have that they’re halfway home. A fake tech support call or message is often how the scammers will approach you, claiming that they’re from Venmo and need to “verify” your login information under some pretext (or perhaps to click on a link in the message for the same reason). Once you’ve done that, they’ll be able to log in to your account and drain it, or — again — use it to fleece your friends and family.
These are just a few examples, and you can be assured that scammers have come up with more. The bottom line is that there are indeed risks, but there are also a lot of ways you can mitigate those risks.
Buying and Selling Safely on Venmo
While it wasn’t the app’s original purpose, Venmo filled an obvious need for buyers and sellers. They’ve tweaked the product accordingly and have provided some reasonably detailed guidance for both buying and selling on the platform. The TL;DR is that a buyer can tag the transaction as a purchase and enjoy a measure of protection, in case there’s a disagreement.
There’s also a hidden danger in there for the seller: if the buyer doesn’t mark the transaction as a purchase, Venmo may later review the payment and claw it back from you (this is likely to happen if the payment was fraudulent). You can forestall this by sending a request to the buyer and tagging it as a purchase, rather than having them send you the payment and hoping they flag it correctly.
If you sell on Venmo frequently, or even use it as a “side hustle,” you’re usually better off adding a business profile to your account. You don’t need to set up a formal business or have an Employer Identification Number (EIN), it’s perfectly fine to set up a business account as a private individual (it’s simply keyed to your SSN for reporting purposes). It’ll give you lots of additional tools for putting your sale items in front of potential customers, and also the documentation you’ll need at tax time.
How to Protect Your Username (and Account) When Selling to Strangers
While this is all very helpful information, it doesn’t directly address the question of giving your username to strangers. Doing that safely requires a few extra precautions.
Take Full Advantage of Venmo’s Security Options
This will make it really hard for scammers to do anything with your username once they have it. Venmo may already periodically send a code to the phone number that’s registered to your account, and require you to enter that before you can log in. You’ve probably told Venmo to “remember this device,” so you won’t have to do it every time, and that’s (usually) okay.
To thwart potential scammers:
- Review your list of “remembered” devices frequently, and remove any that you no longer use or — especially — any that you don’t recognize (that’s a real red flag). If you’re okay with trading convenience for security, delete them all, including your main phone. That way, a code will be required for every login.
- Use an authentication app such as Authy, Google Authenticator, or Microsoft Authenticator to generate that authentication code, instead of having one sent to your phone. It’s more secure than a texted code.
- Set up a PIN, which would be required every time you open the app on your device and, sometimes, for transactions.
- Better yet, set up your account to use biometric authentication (facial recognition, fingerprint reader) instead of a PIN. PINs can be stolen or guessed, but biometric authentication is harder to fool and can’t be phished.
- Limit the amount that’s accessible through your Venmo account, which in turn limits your potential losses. If you’ve linked a credit card, consider switching to a prepaid card with a low balance or a separate card with a low limit. If you’ve linked a debit card or bank account, turn off the overdraft protection so scammers can’t send you into debt.
- One standard piece of advice for buying and selling online is to meet in person whenever possible. Soon (at the time of writing), Venmo will offer a tap-to-pay option for sellers with business accounts, so if meeting in person is a possibility, you’ll be able to simply tap phones instead of giving out your username.
Research Your Prospective Buyer
Only exchanging money with people you know is solid advice, but that doesn’t mean you can’t sell to people on Craigslist or Facebook. Remember, “people you know” is — as scientists and engineers say — a variable, not a constant. To put it another way, “If you don’t know who the other person is? Find out.”
This is easy on Facebook Marketplace, where you can click through to see the potential buyer’s profile. If it goes back years, and has lots of photos and in-jokes and friends or family tagging them on goofy memes, then it’s probably legit. If it’s new or sparse, and its only friends and followers are similarly barebones profiles, it’s more likely to be a scammer.
Spokeo’s people-search tools provide a better and more versatile option. You’ll always have some point of contact for your buyer, whether it’s a phone number, an email, or a name. You can enter those into the corresponding Spokeo search page (if all you have is a username, enter that into the email search), and see what results you get.
If it’s a legitimate buyer, you’ll likely see their real name and address, and any emails or social media accounts associated with them. If it’s a scammer, you may see little information about them (though that’s not necessarily proof that someone is a scammer), or it may show that they’re in an unexpected location (claimed to be just too far away to conveniently meet up, perhaps, but are actually halfway across the country). Alternatively, their Phone Reputation Score (part of the search results) may show that the number’s been used by scammers, or you may even discover that the real person behind the profile has a criminal record.
Buy, Sell, Verify
As with so many things in life, using Venmo can be perfectly safe or a potential minefield, depending on how you use it. Most of those sending you payments will be normal people just wanting to make a purchase, but there’s always a risk you’ll encounter a scammer.
The key, as always, is to “expect the best, but prepare for the worst.” That means, for starters, locking down your Venmo account to the best of your ability (as described above). From there, you can assume that most of the people you deal with are honest, but by all means, check them out before you actually do business.
Spokeo searches only take seconds, and a subscription is really inexpensive (literally, coffee money). It only has to save you from one bad incident to pay for itself many times over, and in the meantime, it’ll provide you with peace of mind. And that, as they say, is priceless.