![]() Soon thereafter, they decided to make payments publicly visible, although not the amounts. The pair initially set up Venmo as a private and text-based platform restricted to BlackBerry devices. Why not, they thought, create a platform that would allow friends to send money to one another? In 2009, Iqram Magdon-Ismail and Andrew Kortina, students at the University of Pennsylvania, came up with the idea for Venmo. student Rajat Tandon (Photo/Courtesy of Rajat Tandon) In other words, what happens on Venmo doesn’t necessarily stay on Venmo. “The notes of other users and sometimes the group’s display name on Venmo expose the sensitive nature of everyone’s membership,” Tandon said. In a contemporaneous study, Mirkovic, Tandon and their colleagues identified scores of Alcoholics Anonymous and biker gang members, as well as gamblers, through their Venmo friend networks - even though many people in these groups went to extraordinary lengths to hide those affiliations, including sending nonsensical messages with their Venmo payments. What the researchers call “privacy leaks” include drug and alcohol use, political leanings, email addresses, phone numbers, and even Wi-Fi, bank account and Netflix passwords. students Rajat Tandon and Pithayuth Charnsethikul Dhiraj Murthy, director of the Computational Media Lab at the University of Texas at Austin and Ishank Arora, a master’s degree student in computer science also at the University of Texas - detailed how millions of Venmo users reveal extremely personal information about themselves on Venmo.īecause Venmo requires users to send messages along with their payments, many users unwittingly provide sensitive information in their online communications, which Venmo by default makes public. In the biggest quantitative study of its kind, a team of researchers - including Mirkovic UCS Viterbi Ph.D. Taken even further, victims of domestic abuse might have their whereabouts and activities unmasked whenever they exchange payments and messages with friends. For instance, it could affect your job prospects,” added Mirkovic, co-author of “I Know What You Did on Venmo: Discovering Privacy Leaks in Mobile Social Payments,” an academic paper will soon be published in the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium. “If you share something that’s sensitive, like ‘Here’s money for drugs or drinks’ or ‘It was a great party in Vegas,’ that can have implications later on. People share addresses that can be misused, either in identity theft or someone could even come and rob you or stalk you,” said Jelena Mirkovic, research associate professor at USC Viterbi and a project leader at the USC Information Sciences Institute. Researchers have found explicit messages between lovers and drug dealers. Journalists have used the app’s search function to uncover a president’s Venmo account, along with his network of associates, including high-ranking officials. Jelena Mirkovic, research associate professor at USC Viterbi and a project leader at the USC Information Sciences Institute (Photo/Courtesy of Jelena Mirkovic) By making so much information publicly available, Venmo inadvertently puts users at risk. Then, scammers contact these users with requests for money.”Īlthough Venmo allows users to make their transactions private, many don’t have the technological wherewithal or presence of mind to change their settings, experts say. ![]() Using the information visible in Venmo’s public feed, they figure out from whom this person had previously sent or received money. 27, 2021 alert: “Scammers are taking advantage of generous friends by changing their username and profile pictures to impersonate real app users. There was only one problem: They had unwittingly given money to a hacker who had had cloned their friend’s Venmo account, replete with his real picture and name.īecause the popular app makes user profiles, payment notes and friend lists public by default, bad actors have repeatedly harvested this information from unwitting users and created fake profiles of Venmo customers, sometimes just by adding a dash or an underscore to their names.Īs the Better Business Bureau warned in an Aug. Assuming that he had some sort of emergency, they transferred money from their Venmo accounts to his. What Woodard didn’t know, according to WSMV News4 in Nashville, Tennessee, is that several of her husband’s friends received the same request at nearly the same time. The hour of the request, coupled with her husband’s strange message, raised suspicions in her mind. He included an electronic note simply saying that he would explain later. In May 2021, Keighley Woodard’s out-of-town spouse asked her to send $195 on the Venmo payment app. The bizarre request came from her husband at 2 a.m.
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