I was always under the impression that if you sent Venmo to the wrong person, you were kind of SOL. Well, sure enough, I was in this predicament 2 weeks ago. A person I knew changed their username w/o telling me, and it seems someone else took their username. I sent about $75 to that new person. I then found out days later about the username change. I then went into Venmo to request the $75 from new person. The person didn’t respond. I even made a comment on the first $75 I spent. Crickets for days.
Eventually, the person linked me to this article – https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/209681208-I-paid-the-wrong-person-. Sure enough, in the app’s contact help session, paying the wrong person is the 2nd or 3rd result. The chat rep asked for the following:
- Username of the person that you sent the funds to
- Amount of the payment
- Date of the payment
- Username and phone number of the person that you meant to pay
The rep then said that they just can’t take money out of the new person’s account without first notifying them, so they emailed them and said if they don’t respond by Friday, they’d get my money back. Then on Saturday morning, I got this email:
Hi Vinh,
XXXXXX K. here again from Venmo Support. Great news! The accidental payment you sent to newperson has been returned to your original funding source used for the payment. The funds should arrive there in 3-5 business days.
Thanks again for your patience while we looked into this, and please don’t hesitate to reach out if you need help with anything else.
Best regards.
Venmo Support
I am not sure if this is the same process you can use if you were scammed, but it seems that you do have some options with Venmo (at least for accidental sends.)
https://adequateman.deadspin.com/mike-lombardi-is-a-big-stupid-moron-1822759998 Check out the email of the week at the bottom; it’s from Mrs. Toaster…
haha what’d you wind up doing?
I think she ignored him at first but then he must have initiated something with Venmo, like what you describe, and they clawed the $$$ back. (It was still in her Venmo balance I don’t think she’d withdrawn to her bank account).
“A person I knew” – you make it sound like you took me out back to the wood shed after this happened! Hahaha thanks again for following up, won’t ever make that mistake again!