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Comment by jlardinois | Hacker News Reader

I had a similar issue with Venmo—a friend tried to pay me back for a Cuban sandwich, and the transaction was held up because he just wrote "Cubans" as the description. Only in Venmo's case, the issue was resolved mere hours after he sent an email explaining the situation.

I opened a Coinbase account back in college ~6 years ago when they were giving $10 in Bitcoin to anyone who signed up with a .edu email address. I forgot about it until last summer, when I realized that amount was now worth around $160.

I didn't have access to my college email anymore, so having to provide proof of identity was reasonable; having the entire process take a month wasn't. They also do this particularly insidious thing where if they don't respond to your request for two weeks or so, they automatically close it as unresolved. They do automatically reopen it if you send another email, but that you have to do that in the first place is dumb.

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Woah. Venmo parses and makes decisions on the description field before performing the transaction? That's wild. I would have thought that to just be a convenience field for the customers. So Venmo decides what you can spend money on and what you can't? Yikes, I'm happy to not use it regularly.

Every payment service provider is required to filter transactions if they offer payment services to consumers. (Part of AML, anti-money-laundering legislation) In essence, there's a set of things that money can't be spent on, and it's their responsibility to take measures ensuring that their customers don't spend (in significant amounts) money on that, and show that these measures are reasonably effective (i.e. that they're not just for show - if they assist their customers to circumvent their filters, that's a crime) or not offer payment services at all. For some of the wider restrictions (e.g. payments to cuban nationals) it may result in quite wide-catching automatic filters; and it's the choice of the company whether just to block the payment or spend time and $ to have a human look at the payment and make a decision on whether you can spend money on that or not.

If you want to use services that ignore what you can spend money on and what you can't, you literally have to use illegal services - no legitimate company in the western world is allowed to offer that.

> If you want to use services that ignore what you can spend money on and what you can't, you literally have to use illegal services

Cash between friends is not illegal. Venmo, for lots of people including me, just replaces cash for paying your friends back. That's even their #1 example they have on their website for why you might use Venmo.

There is no agency or anyone in charge of asking what I'm spending the money on when I give my friend a $5 for lunch. If Venmo wants to replace that experience, they can't refuse the payment because they think I'm suspicious and expect to keep my business.

I understand the pressure they are under as a payment processor. But the alternative to Venmo to keep payment privacy intact is not illegal, it's just plain old cash.

Well yes, that's kind of the point - replicating this part of the experience of paying someone directly in cash is illegal. No matter what Venmo wants it can't replace that (part of the) experience and, more importantly, neither can any of their competitors. So you either keep using cash or (no matter if you pick Venmo or someone else) get a different experience.

Also, don't forget that above certain amounts cash between friends also needs to obey a bunch of reporting rules and can not be entirely private. Simply taking a briefcase of cash from your buddy and leaving it at that is illegal.

Except it's not cash, even if it seems to be used like cash. It's an online transaction, which eventually becomes a bank transaction if you ever want to cash out, so not surprising the same rules apply.

In case it wasn't immediately obvious from my original comment, the issue was that "Cubans" is ambiguous and could be related to commerce that might be covered by sanctions against Cuba.

I Tried to Venmo $12.66 for 'ISIS' and the Government Was Pissed. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5gqyzd/i-tried-to-venmo-1...

As the subtitle points out, neither Venmo or the Treasury Department shares the author’s sense of humour.

Thanks for sharing. I’ll have to remember to curb my dark sense of humor next time I find myself having to use their app.

More than likely (in fact I would put it at like, 99% chance):

It's an OFAC thing. If they allow money transactions from Cuban nationals they run the risk of pissing off the Treasury dept.

Many companies do it in a very ham-fisted way (flag anything with "Cuba" in the title, etc.).

That's why for every single transaction that I do on venmo, I put "payment" as the descriptor.

Which is crazy because I've only used it once or twice but each time I've noticed many people use tongue in cheek descriptions like "for drugs" or "strippers" when they are just splitting a bar tab.

You will get called for this - I had a friends whose summer job at venmo was to call people and ask them to change the description from ‘sex’ or ‘drugs’ to something more innocuous - or to please stop buying drugs through Venmo.

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