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The buyer in Venmo has pretty much no recourse whereas in PayPal it's pretty much the opposite… likely something to do with their early relationship with eBay.
by tedmiston 9y ago
The buyer in Venmo has pretty much no recourse whereas in PayPal it's pretty much the opposite… likely something to do with their early relationship with eBay.
- astura 9y agoSo? The GP's complained his or her friend got scammed through PayPal as the "seller" (of services), not the "buyer." My point is Venmo would not have have protected the friend from this scam and, in fact, it would have been 10 times easier to pull off the scam because Venmo forbids this sort of buyer/seller commercial transaction with personal accounts. Nobody has any sort of "protection." The big difference between the two services is PayPal is designed mainly for commercial activities and Venmo is designed for already established friends to more easily chip in for gas. The friend was very naïve to accept a PayPal payment for a business transaction that wasn't covered by PayPal's Seller Protection while simultaneously expecting PayPal to protect against fraud. PayPal does cover sellers when there are unauthorized (or "unauthorized") charges but it doesn't apply to services, just physical goods (and excludes certain items like gift cards). It's like saying that the post office shouldn't be trusted to deliver greeting cards because a stranger sent you a fake check through the mail. [I've successfully used PayPal's seller protection for an unauthorized charge and it was a real easy process.]
- sillysaurus3 9y agoMy comment didn't mention Venmo at all. The point was to warn people not to use PayPal. It doesn't matter if it was naive when most people would expect PayPal to process a transaction. You don't need to take my word for it. PayPal has a long and majestic history on HN consisting of hundreds of stories of how terrible PayPal is.