Cancel a Payment to a New User
A New User designation in Venmo means you’ve searched for an email address or phone number that doesn’t have a registered Venmo account. If you do this for a friend, they have the option to create an account and claim the money. If they don’t create an account your money is left out in limbo. You can reclaim it with these steps:
Cancel a Venmo Payment
If you’ve made a Venmo payment to a registered user, then those funds are instantly in their Venmo balance for their use. You can’t actually cancel a payment that you’ve sent in Venmo, so you’re left with a few options. Your first (and best) option is to simply ask the recipient to send the payment back to you. This is one of the main reasons that it’s generally recommended to use Venmo with people you know, so that if you send $700 instead of $7 by accident you can just ask your friend to send it back … and that’s a true story. If you sent a payment to the wrong person entirely, the first thing you should do is send them a message and request they send it back. This is much faster than going through Venmo’s system to have them mediate the transaction. You can contact Venmo if the recipient is unresponsive, sending the user and payment information, but there are no guarantees they can straighten it out. The last option is available only if the funds are still in the recipient’s Venmo account and haven’t been used or transferred to their bank. If that’s the case, then you can request for Venmo to reverse the transaction; however, the recipient still has to give their permission for this to happen.
Avoid Cancelling Venmo Payments
The best thing is to avoid this process in general. Check the user photo before you pay someone, and make sure it’s correct. When you’re putting in the amount, make sure you’re typing carefully, and confirm the amount (watch the decimal point) before you finalize the transaction. Double-check everything, making sure that you haven’t made an accidental error. Once again, Venmo recommends you only use it with people you know, which minimizes the headache from trying to recover from one of these simple mistakes.
