Stop Venmo SMS notification

Venmo’s notification system

Just like any social based services, Venmo wants you to know what your friends are doing so it will entice you to be part of it. Do I really need to know if my friend Paul paid Chris $10 for a lunch? Not really. Since there are lots of people who don’t want to mess around with settings, they turned on the most notifications(spam) as default.

SPAM

Even after I turn off all the notifications manually, it will still send me a SMS message whenever a new friend(from contact list or facebook friend, dunno where they are getting the list), joins Venmo. I really don’t care about privacy much, but I do care about SPAM. I double checked the notification settings on the app and on the web, but I still get that message. Thankfully not many friends are joining Venmo frequently, but it pisses me off. I checked with couple of my friends, and they were in same situations.

Solution

It was really obvious, but I don’t use SMS much so I didn’t know. My friend suggested texting back “stop” to the SMS I get whenever a friend joins Venmo. It worked!

Venmo: You will no longer receive SMS from Venmo. Reply “Resume” to resume SMS. Have a great day!

What should change

Just like what Facebook has done recently, Venmo also notifies about a payment my friends made to his/her friends, even though I don’t know that person. I know this is their Marketing strategy, but do I really need to know what my friends are doing with their money? Unlike Facebook, this is real money we are talking about, I think people should have some privacy. Those notifications should be turned off by default, not optionally. I hope Venmo makes the right decisions down the road.