The next morning, “I tweeted at support, and I was like, this is ridiculous,” he says. Charania says he filled out Venmo’s “ Contact Us” support form and waited, but hours passed without any response. The email and password associated with the account were changed, though he was never notified of any resets, and he had to use the “forgot password” option to regain access. In December, Charania says, his account was hacked for more than $2,000. One of those frustrated users, Mohsin Charania, a professional poker player, told me a story similar to Grey’s. Peruse replies to the Twitter feed and you’ll find plenty of users complaining that the company has not answered their emailed requests for assistance. Grey isn’t the only one to report an experience like this. More than 24 hours after he first contacted Venmo, Grey was still waiting. on Thursday, then again at 6:50 p.m., 7:43 p.m., and finally at 9:38 a.m. Grey says he went ahead and contacted Venmo almost immediately after learning of the unauthorized activity and reaching out to Chase, at first via the company’s online contact form and then to Grey provided Slate with email correspondence showing that he first wrote to the support email address at 11:55 a.m. On the security page, the company advises customers who “suspect that there has been any unauthorized activity” to “contact us immediately at here to help.” (You can also tweet What’s not noted on the security page-but is buried in section C, part 1, small letter n, roman numeral iv of Venmo’s user agreement-is that you should do this immediately, because if “you contact the Company within two Business Days after learning of the loss or theft, then your liability shall not exceed the lesser of $50.00 USD or the amount of unauthorized transfers that took place on your account before you provided notice to the Company.” After two business days, your liability can jump as high as $500, per Venmo’s terms. You won’t find a phone number on the contact portion of its website. Venmo doesn’t offer that level of assistance. One of the great promises of a credit card is the small customer service number printed on the back. They have fraud departments to handle problems like Grey’s, and dedicated hotlines for customers to call if something happens. If nothing else, dealing with fraud is something banks are very good at. Venmo says its mobile-transfer infrastructure “uses bank-grade security systems and data encryption to protect you and guard against any unauthorized transactions and access to your personal or financial information.” But when a hacker who breaches an account using your password can send $2,850 as quickly and conveniently as a twentysomething can repay $7 for a burrito, that’s clearly not enough. It doesn’t offer two-factor verification, an increasingly common security layer that requires users to provide a secondary passcode to access an account, though it’s working to implement it. Urgent emails about stolen funds receive slow responses. (Its parent PayPal, which oversaw $64.3 billion in transactions in the last quarter of 2014, has more than 10,000.) Three years after the service left its beta phase, Venmo doesn’t have a dedicated phone line for customer issues. As of November, Venmo only had around 70 full-time employees. But for all its promise as a smooth and efficient financial service, Venmo’s popularity seems to be outpacing its customer-support capabilities. By making the money transfers quick, uncomplicated, and even cool, Venmo is winning.
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