I think Venmo is more at fault here than the government. The government prohibits asset transfers between a certain public list of organizations. This list hap

I think Venmo is more at fault here than the government. The government prohibits asset transfers between a certain public list of organizations. This list happens to include an organization called "ISIS". Implementing that prohibition is Venmo's problem. Venmo then wrote a program to just scan all transactions against the list and auto-block all matches, as the least-effort path to compliance. It's not Venmo's money, so they don't care. Most people whose legitimate transfers get blocked in this filter don't have a media platform to complain about it, so they aren't worried about negative publicity. Finally, in terms of risk analysis, false positives are much cheaper than false negatives. If they allow a legally prohibited transfer through, then they're going to face a firestorm from the government. Expensive. But if they block many legitimate transfers, they only annoy a few users and at most have to issue a few refunds. Cheap. Actually having a human involved in the decision would cost them more, and expose them to more risk. So, simple dumb keyword filters control our private finances now.