Being careful, before I accepted payments, I made sure that my bank account was properly linked. I then accepted payments and immediately tried to withdraw those funds to my bank account. Then, my clients received e-mails from Venmo telling them to prove their identity, and they froze my account. Myself and all my clients have to provide a ridiculous amount of information and worst of all we have to sign a legally binding document asserting that we didn’t violate the Terms of Service and other things. The problem with this is two-fold. One, my clients don’t know the law and won’t sign a legal document like this. And two, the TOS, are literally of book length, and until I seek legal counsel I can’t sign a document of that nature myself. In fact, if you read the TOS you would likely never use their service, it says that they can confiscate $2500 of your funds for little or no reason with no recourse.

So I have about $15,000 in frozen funds. It says pending to my bank account, it has said this for a while, but my clients can’t pay me and it tells them that I’m frozen. I need these funds to pay my bills, because I already provided the product to my clients, who to no fault of their own, already paid. While the TOS are Orwellian, if they confiscated 2500, and let me keep the rest while things are pending, at least I’d be able to pay off my bills. But right now they are violating their own TOS.

I’d advice EVERYONE, to stay away from venmo until these types of issues are resolved. At least be very careful with the funds you put in. I am racking up credit card interest and this is turning out to be very expensive.

I will update you if things change, I’m not just a hater, I actually liked this service, until they stole all my money.

It’s a great service that wins through simplicity.