[jlardinois]

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.

[cryptoz]

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.

[PeterisP]

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.

[madeofpalk]

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.

[IronKettle]

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.).

[jjeaff]

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

[colinbartlett]

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.