![]() 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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