Dark Patterns at Venmo

In this article, I want to highlight some of the deception going on at Venmo. I hope to shame Venmo into stopping their malicious design practices and prevent some of you from falling into the same trap that I did.

Inspiration

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out this talk by Harry Brignull called “Dark Patterns: User Interfaces Designed to Trick People”. It’s an enlightening discussion about how design, much like hacking, can be used for good and evil.

He launched a website darkpatterns.org to keep track of companies that use evil design patterns and it might surprise you how many companies you’ll recognize.

Deceptive Fees

If you’re millennial, you probably use Venmo. It’s one of the easiest ways to transfer money from one person to another. Let me show you how it works:

First, you go into the app and draft a new payment.

You select “PAY” and you’re asked to confirm the payment:

You select “PAY” again and you’ll see a loading notification:

And then you’re shown this social feed of all your friend’s payments including your most recent transaction at the top.

Looks like I paid Meghan Navarro $100. At least that’s what you would expect right? In the other tab, I can see a list of just my transactions and I see that payment is right at the top.

I can click on the payment to see the details page which ironically gives me very little information about the payment.

Aside: If you’re not too familiar with Venmo, it’s trying to be some kind of social app where my friends can actually comment on the transaction. It’s pretty weird if you ask me.

All is fine an dandy, but you might notice some weird discrepancies on your credit card bill. And in fact, if you go online to view your transaction history, you’ll notice that you’ve actually been charged a 3% fee.

How should I know that? I was never notified of this fee when making the payment, and this fee is reflected absolutely nowhere within the app itself in regards to this payment. This primarily a mobile application—I suspect very few people who use Venmo have ever logged on to the website. So the fact that these fees are being charged without notifying you and aren’t being reflected in your transaction list on your phone is deceptive and malicious design.

I contacted Venmo support with this issue and they notified me that I need to set up a bank account with the app to avoid these fees. So I went into the settings page within the app, and sure enough, I already have a bank account connected!

Note that there is a little disclaimer down there about the 3% fee. When I go to the details page for the card, you’ll notice that it is selected as the means for refilling my account to make payments.

And when I go to the bank details page, I have to select my bank account as the preferred payment method for refilling my account to make payments.

Evil Design

So I’m no longer being charged for transferring money after fixing this setting, but why isn’t Venmo displaying the fees within the application? Why aren’t they asking you to confirm your intention to accept the fee when you’re making a payment? And why aren’t they pulling money out of your bank account by default since it is available, avoiding the fee entirely?

It’s hard for me to refrain from a very cynical perspective here. But one thing is for sure — this design is deceiving their users into paying fees that they are entirely unaware of. I’ve been using Venmo for 3 years. I downloaded my entire Venmo history (which is prohibitively difficult) and it turns out, I’ve paid a total of $266.42 in fees that I was completely unaware of. That’s a steep price for a “free” app.

The choice in design here has had huge consequences for me. Just check out this transaction and the amount of money was was actually charged.

They charged me $49.50 for that transaction and the fee was entirely avoidable. Clearly Venmo values their own profits over their users’ best interests.

Conclusion

As Harry Brignull mentioned in his talk, tech companies these days are very data-driven. They A/B test every design change and look at impacts on their analytics. If Venmo changes their design to present a modal that confirms with the user their intention to accept a 3% fee for their payment, or, at the very least, display the actual amount charged to the user in the user’s transaction list, do you think their conversion statistics are going to go up? Certainly not! But that’s the point about dark patterns — they’re easy for a company to fall prey to.

I remain optimistic that Venmo is a great company full of good people who want to do the right thing. But their customer support has been entirely unhelpful or sympathetic. So here’s my call to action:

• Open up your Venmo settings and make sure you aren’t getting charged that fee!
• If you were unaware that Venmo was charging you, you can go here to figure out how much you’ve paid in Venmo fees.
• File a complaint with Venmo — link to this article and tell them how much they owe you for your deception.
• Fill out this form so we can join forces and hold them accountable to honest and transparent design.
• For any questions, feel free to create an Issue on Github.