Venmo is a widely popular mobile payments app owned by Paypal. While Venmo is to be used only with the people you know and trust, sometimes you may come across an issue of receiving a payment, where you can’t recognize the person and would want to reject or deny such a payment. But do we even have this option and is there any guidance from Venmo on how to reject a payment, read on to find out.
The way Venmo is designed is that the users need to be more cautious and use Venmo only for transactions within their circle of trust i.e. family, friends since the Venmo payments are generally irreversible.
Even if you are using your Venmo account to make payments for goods or services, the buyer has to be specifically call this out, if the payment is made to a seller’s personal profile, so that Venmo flags it as purchase transaction. Or you can make the payment to the seller’s business profile. Both these cases can be covered by Venmo Buyer protection.
As a Venmo user, you obviously have control over whom you send payments to. But what’s not within your control is the receipt i.e. if some random person sends you the money and you have no idea on why some stranger has sent you the money.
In such a situation, it can be difficult and it’s natural for a person to seek options to reject or deny such payment.
Can You Reject Payment on Venmo?
As per Venmo’s official FAQ, if you have received a payment from a stranger, you can contact Venmo support to help you reverse the payment. Venmo does not provide you any option to deny or reject a payment, at your own end.
As per Venmo set up, the funds are made available to the recipient almost immediately and payment is irreversible, once it is initiated by someone.
The recipient does not get any option to explicitly accept or deny a payment received.
In such situations, the guidance from Venmo on this topic, is that if you have received money from Strangers, you don’t recognize, you can contact the support team to help get the payment reversed.
Stranger Send Payment to me on Venmo
There can be two scenarios in such a case- where there is a genuine error on behalf of someone who has sent you the payment by mistake. There are situations where in the person keyed in the wrong details or simply searched for a name using Venmo’s search feature.
However, Venmo does ask the sender to enter last 4 digits of mobile number if the recipient name is not in their contacts list. So the possibility to make wrong payment is rare, but not impossible.
Or could also be something fishy where someone may have paid you using a stolen credit card or bank information. If it is later found to be such a case, such money could be removed from your Venmo account subsequently.
Infact Venmo has been educating users on various scams that are prevalent on Venmo so that users can avoid it. Here, specifically, check the scam regarding payment from strangers.
So Venmo guidance says if you received a payment from someone you know accidentally, you can send them the money back.
But if you receive a payment from stranger, it is best to contact the Venmo support to help reverse the payment, as there are scams that happen otherwise.
The issue of getting a payment from stranger is a widely discussed topic online including Reddit forums, where many users have also opined to do nothing and wait for the transaction to get reversed. But Venmo recently updated its guidance giving you the option to report such payments to Venmo support team who can help you get the reversal done.
If you are in doubt in such a situation, the best thing is you can contact Venmo support with the full details of the issue and then act based on the solution offered there.
Here’s how to contact Venmo support:
- Tap on the person icon (if you are using the new Venmo version) to open the settings
- Choose “Get Help” from the options menu
- Select “Contact Us,” then “Email Us,” or “Chat with Us,” depending on your preferred choice of communication
What you can do to prevent such issues from happening again
You also have the option in Venmo to block users from finding you on Venmo. This removes any possibility of person sending or receiving money from you.
So you can block any user who has paid you accidentally or otherwise so that it does not get repeated again.
It also helps if you make your profile private to avoid your social feed showing any updates on your Venmo transactions.
Wrap Up
Unfortunately, Venmo does not offer a direct option to reject a payment, as per its design. We hope that they come up with a feature to handle such situations better. Until then, you can contact Venmo support to get the transaction reversed in such cases, when in doubt.
