Venmo Is Killing Their Cash Cow

Venmo has gone completely out of their mind with their ban hammer and they certainly are severely overestimating network effects.

Today I was a victim because of a tertiary transaction where I withdrew funds that bounced from the person who paid the person who paid me. Venmo literally applied the transitive property of math to financial transactions... and this is supposed to be a Bank/large laundry.

I am not the only one, in fact thousands of users have found themselves banned for little apparent cause in the last few months. When I attempted to seek resolution or even an explanation I could have sworn I heard the same guy who told my 12-year-old self he would be keeping my life savings for 6 months because I figured out you could buy and sell things to yourself using PayPal coupons for 20% off and there was no limit.

Either way, Venmo must be executing a page out of Paypals old textbook by failing to realize the network effects high users have on such fragile ecosystem surrouned by Apple, Google, Snapchat, and Facebook who would all love to eath their lunch.

Now I know the people at venmo are aware of the so-called "awkward acquaintance" every friend has, but how am I supposed to know if the money is valid when checks take time to fully bounce. It seems the path they are on is almost assured suicide especially since I am finding it very easy to get people to switch to apple pay (if avail).

Literally, the only thing venmo had going for them over any other monotonous bank site was the transaction feed and they are ruining it. I'm sure the IRS wants to stick their noes in venmo's books over money laundering worries but that's not how the government works. Venmo needs to sack up and do some real work because banning your user base isn't a good idea when the kinder ones (aka the ones more likely to spend money on consumer goods and gifts) decide to leave.