Venmo Online Gambling
Venmo was receiving a gradual roll out in North American during late 2017. For new adopters, there are still key issues such as where is Venmo accepted / who takes it. The focus is very much on mainstream retailers, so don’t except to be gambling with Venmo. Perhaps the best known example of this is PayPal’s Venmo, which has proven extremely successful in many parts of the world, including the United States. But other examples are also utilized by many.
If you checked your Venmo feed last Sunday between 6pm and midnight, you might have noticed that it was awash with Super Bowl-related transactions, from the semi-innocuous 'tom brady is bad bye!!!!!!!!!,” to the more, uh, sus 'Rigging the Super Bowl.” Venmo told The Outline Sunday in no uncertain terms that gambling on sports through Venmo is not only broadly illegal in most places in the US, but against the company's terms of service. According to research done by The Outline using the transaction data available through Venmo’s public API, on average 44 percent of Sunday night's transactions included messages with Super-Bowl-related terms and 14 percent directly referenced gambling.
All Venmo transactions require a message of some sort, and they’re generally pretty transparent. Inspired in part by Vicemo — the website that provides a comprehensive list of every public Venmo transaction accompanied by a vice-related message (like, a bunch of tree emojis, “drank,” “drugs,” or, of course, the ever popular “drugz”) — I sampled transactions for the messages listed in Venmo’s public API against a variety of Super Bowl keywords (“football,” “Super Bowl,” “fucktomb,” etc.) and gambling-related keywords (“squares,” “prop,” or “bet,” as in, “In hindsight, maybe betting the mortgage on the Patriots wasn’t the best idea”) keywords in order to get a rough estimate of the number of people who used Venmo for possibly illegal purposes last night.
Based on my research, there were about 139,500 Venmo transactions occurring per hour, which evens out to approximately 837,100 Venmo transactions over the course of the evening. Forty-four percent of these transactions were obviously related to the Super Bowl in some way, and at its peak in the minutes after the game ended, 14 percent of transactions explicitly referenced gambling (i.e. 'Refund for super bowl squares,” “illegal super bowl gambling”), with an 8 percent average overall.
I’m guessing (hoping?) that a sizable portion of Super Bowl Sunday betters were a little less conspicuous with their payments. Regardless, there was likely anywhere from 65,000 to 370,000 Super Bowl gambling-related transactions on Venmo Sunday night. This is all, mind you, illegal in most states and totally against Venmo’s Terms of Service.
Despite the fact that Venmo staffed its HQ specifically for this event, the app still experienced a considerable amount of lag directly after the big game. Lots of users took to Twitter to point the finger at gamblers, who they alleged had overwhelmed the app with Super Bowl-related payouts.
Why is Venmo so slow? Is it because everyone is using it to pay off lost bets?
— Caleb Kaslik (@calebkaz96) February 5, 2018My entire Venmo timeline is people losing money on the Super Bowl.
— Jack Falahee (@RestingPlatypus) February 5, 2018While the Super Bowl is Venmo’s biggest day of the year, it’s certainly not the only day its users appear to gamble: An analysis by Quartz in 2017 showed that up to a third of the transactions on the whole service appeared to be gambling-related on the morning of the first March Madness game. Venmo did not respond to a request for comment.
Venmo PayPal represents an act of diversification from the world’s best-known eWallet provider. Here, the intention is to explore how it works and what the benefits might be.
Making Venmo Payments Online
Venmo was receiving a gradual roll out in North American during late 2017. For new adopters, there are still key issues such as where is Venmo accepted / who takes it. The focus is very much on mainstream retailers, so don’t except to be gambling with Venmo in the near future – just stick with PayPal casino deposits for now.
What is Venmo?
In explaining Venmo, it is essentially a new eWallet that can connect with PayPal, debit/credit cards, or bank accounts. Of course, there are other considerations relating to what exactly this is.
P2P Payments
Venmo offers the capability for completing person-to-person payments in a more streamlined way than PayPal. Through the Venmo mobile app, users shall be able to complete P2P / peer-to-peer payments. These can be for personal transactions between friends or else to split bills in cafés and restaurants.
How it Works
Now that the basics have been explained, it is worth seeing how to get started and whether the process differs greatly next to PayPal and other eWallets:
- Create an account: A new user can visit the Venmo site and create an account through signing up via PayPal or submitting their email address.
- Download the Venmo app: Venmo has created apps that are downloadable through the App Store or Google Play.
- Add a payment method: After setting up the account, you then need to verify your bank account or credit/debit card through completing a micro transaction.
Where is Venmo Accepted?
As of late 2017, Venmo can only be used by US residents, who must also have a US cell phone number. In addition, users must also hold a valid US bank account. There is currently no word on whether Venmo shall be opened to UK / international / countries anytime soon, but there is already stiff competition waiting.
Venmo Online Gambling Games
What Are the UK Venmo Alternative?
The UK does not currently have access to Venmo, but there are already alternatives that Venmo will have to contend with if the eWallet does enter the marketplace:
- Paym: Users have the ability to make mobile bank transfers without having to enter an account number of sort code. All that will be required is the person’s mobile phone number.
- Circle: eWallets can come with frees from using payment methods to fund them, but Circle is a mobile app promising to send money like a text message and without frustrating fees being added on.
- Verse: The Verse mobile app is available now via the App Store and Google Play. Those who install Verse shall have the power to make instant mobile payments in the same timeframe as sending a text.
Venmo Online Gambling Sites
Venmo highlights how digital payment providers are constantly trying to evolve the process to become more efficient, but there is no telling whether or not this will ever be suitable for online gambling.