![]() These include drug and alcohol use, political leanings, email addresses, phone numbers, and even Wi-Fi, bank account and Netflix passwords. In the biggest quantitative study of its kind, Mirkovic and a team of researchers-including USC Viterbi PhD 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 users reveal highly personal information about themselves on Venmo.īecause Venmo requires users to send messages with their payments, many unwittingly provide what the researchers call “privacy leaks” in their online communications. 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,” adds Mirkovic, co-author of “I Know What You Did on Venmo: Discovering Privacy Leaks in Mobile Social Payments,” an academic paper recently published in the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium. “If you share something sensitive, like ‘Here’s money for drugs or drinks’ or ‘It was a great party in Vegas,’ that can have implications later on. Someone could even come and rob you or stalk you,” says Jelena Mirkovic, research associate professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and a project leader at the USC Information Sciences Institute. “People share addresses that can be misused identity theft. By making so much information publicly available, Venmo inadvertently puts users at risk. Someone could even come and rob you or stalk you.Īlthough Venmo allows users to make their transactions private, experts say many don’t have the technological wherewithal or presence of mind to change their settings. People share addresses that can be misused identity theft. Then, scammers contact these users with requests for money.” It’s widespread enough that the Better Business Bureau warned users of the scam in August 2021: “Using the information visible in Venmo’s public feed, they figure out from whom this person had previously sent or received money. Researchers have found explicit messages between lovers and drug dealers.Īnd bad actors have repeatedly harvested information from unwitting users and created fake profiles of Venmo customers, sometimes just by adding a hyphen or an underscore to their names, to request money. ![]() Journalists have used the app’s search function to uncover President Joe Biden’s Venmo account and his network of associates-including other high-ranking officials. The popular payment app makes user profiles, payment notes and friend lists public by default so anyone can see your information. The problem? They had unwittingly given money to a hacker who had cloned their friend’s Venmo account, complete with his real picture and name. ![]() According to WSMV News4 in Nashville, Tenn., his friends assumed he had some sort of emergency and transferred money from their Venmo accounts to his. What Woodard didn’t know 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 her suspicions. 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 him $195 on the Venmo payment app. The bizarre request came from her husband at 2 a.m. ![]()
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