'It was Venmo Support's phone number that they called me.' 'I looked up on my phone while I was on the phone call,' he said. So when he got a call from Venmo Support saying something fishy was going on with his account, he was suspicious from the get-go. So how did he end up bamboozled out of more than $1,000?Ĭameron Howell is always suspicious about calls from numbers he doesn't know. It happened to a Taylorsville man who was actively taking steps to prevent fraud. They're targeting people who use the apps and, in some cases, stealing their money. SALT LAKE CITY – Many people use apps like Zelle or Venmo because they make it really convenient to share money between friends and family – and scammers know it. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.

Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. The Negreanu and Seidel hacks are far from the first time that poker players have been targeted.This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Stories of Venmo users losing up to $3,000 have been reported.’ And by changing the user’s linked email address, hackers can reroute a user’s transaction notifications, leaving them in the dark until the bank finally notifies them of balance changes, long after thefts occur. Investopedia describe that hackers have been able to circumvent the encryption technology, explaining: ‘After gaining access to a user’s account, hackers can easily transfer a user’s Venmo balance to a new bank account. It’s not quite clear how Negreanu’s money disappeared, but if hackers accessed his account they could easily have just sent DNegs funds to a fake Venmo account of their own, and withdrawn to any linked bank credit or debit card. Scammers have also used Venmo to make fraudulent purchases, leaving sellers without the product they were selling or any of the dollars they thought they were making from the sale.’

Internet security specialists Norton wrote about it last year: ‘Hackers have discovered that they can use Venmo to trick users into providing their bank account information or Social Security numbers. Both hacks were of the poker stars’ Venmo accounts, a PayPal-owned company that offers customers a peer-to-peer digital wallet, primarily used for paying day-to-day expenses but also as a quick-and-easy way to send funds to friends and family.įor poker pros such as Negreanu and Seidel, those expenses and transactions are likely to be generally much larger than most users, but it is not considered to be the safest place to store large sums of money.

Venmo account hacked