My son is autistic, and we created a credit union account for him a few years ago, as a way to teach him about money, and to have a place to store checks that relatives inevitably send in his name. It's a smart choice.The account has basically stayed dormant for three years - which is fine because credit unions are cool about that.My wife signed in to his account this past week, and saw that there were Venmo "CASHOUT" deposits, and even Venmo verification amounts as far back as March, with the cashout deposits as recent as the end of April.She contacted Venmo, I contacted Venmo, no love.What likely happened was, someone flipped a few digits in the account number, and Venmo - for some horrible reason - allowed the Venmo customer to interact with my son's bank account without verifying the account. (Only my wife has access to his account, his information is locked in a safe.)So Venmo tells us to contact our bank, but the problem isn't with the bank, the problem is that Venmo clearly has TERRIBLE security.VENMO: if you are listening....*** You should NEVER allow a Venmo customer to interact with ANY bank account until they have FULLY verified that they own the account, by entering the two random deposit amounts. ***If you allow someone to interact with a bank account without verifying the account first, I can't help but feel that you are breaking some sort of federal banking law.Now, these were deposits, not withdrawals, but who's to say that Venmo couldn't attempt to take the money back, and potentially cause an overdraft situation - at $35 a pop.This is not good.So Venmo won't help. Their security is clearly bad. They need to figure out what went wrong, but no one is willing to even look into the problem.We provided all the information required - including a screen shot of the credit union account's history, so they could see the partially redacted account number, and the two verification deposits and withdrawals.Meanwhile, my autistic son learns that companies like Venmo are not to be trusted, and he needs to lose his three year old credit union account because Venmo sucks and will make no effort to improve.Things we confirmed: My our family has never interacted with Venmo before (never downloaded or used the app, nothing in our email, nothing in text messages), and the credit union banking information has been locked away a secure safe for three years. The passwords we use for banking are extremely high entropy, and change regularly, stored in a triple-encrypted professional password manager.Venmo: get your act together. I would give Venmo NEGATIVE stars if I could.
