How To Unblock Someone on Venmo

While not everyone is thrilled with the idea of visible money transfers, there’s no denying that Venmo is growing and on track to handle even more transactions in the near future. PayPal reported that they had around 40 million active Venmo users in 2018.

And, while Venmo makes it a lot easier to send money to friends, at times, it can also be somewhat too transparent, ever for millennials. Therefore, it’s good to see that some privacy settings can be altered and that your online presence and payment history isn’t on display for everyone to see. That is, unless you want them to be.

How to Block Users on Venmo

1. Tap the three lines icon.
2. Tap “Search People”.
3. Go to a user’s profile page.
4. Tap the icon with three circles at upper right corner.
5. Tap “Block” (the option is written in red).

Note that you will have to logout and restart the app for the changes to take effect.

Effects of Blocking Someone on Venmo

After you block a person on Venmo you won’t be able to find them in the app. They will no longer show up in your network. Searching their name will also yield no results.

The same thing happens if someone deletes their Venmo account. Their name no longer shows up in search results and no payments can be sent or requested.

What’s also interesting is that a person that you’ve blocked can’t search for your account information, either. They can’t send or request payments to and from you.

Also, no notification is sent to a user, indicating that you’ve blocked them. This may lead some people to believe that you’ve simply deleted your account.

If you want to see if someone has blocked you, you have to do so from another Venmo account. Vice versa also applies.

Because of this, Venmo users can’t mutually block each other. That is, unless both parties initiate an account block before logging out.

How to Unblock Users on Venmo

Say you’ve made a mistake or impulsively blocked someone after a heated argument. If that person still has a valid account, you can always use Venmo’s unblock feature to make both your profiles visible to each other again and allow transactions between your two accounts.

1. Tap the three lines icon.
2. Scroll down and tap “Settings”.
3. Select “Privacy”.
4. Tap “Blocked Users”.
5. Select a user.
6. Tap the three-dot icon in the upper right corner to bring up a menu.
7. Tap “Unblock” twice to confirm.

Note that you will have to add that person to your friends list again.

Additional Privacy Control

Some people turn to blocking users in order to hide their payment activity from their feeds. This is a radical solution, given the control Venmo grants its users over their privacy settings. Here’s how you can make all your transactions private in a few simple steps.

1. Go to “Settings”.
2. Tap “Privacy”.
3. Select “Private” from the list of options.
4. Tap “Save Settings”.

This way, only you and the sender/recipient will be able to see that transaction. You can of course keep everything public and change privacy settings on individual transactions. You can also change the default privacy settings to private and allow individual transactions to be viewed by everyone or just those in your network.

1. Bring up a payment screen.
2. Tap on the privacy settings icon.
3. Select the option you want from the “Who can see this?” screen.

All three options, “Public”, “Friends”, “Private”, will still show the payment info to both sender and recipient. The only difference is who else outside the two will see the transaction in their feeds.

You can also exercise your right to hide previous transactions. Just remember that this action can’t be altered further down the line. Once you’ve changed the privacy settings for a past transaction it stays like that forever.

1. Go to “Settings”.
2. Tap “Privacy”.
3. Go to “Past Transactions”.
4. Chose the option you want.
   

Obviously, you don’t have to do this for payments that were already made private. In fact, you can’t even alter the status of past private payments. This is why you should always be certain that you want to keep some portions of your transaction history private.

Final Thoughts

The best thing about Venmo is the fact that you’re no longer tied to an email address to use an online payment service. This mobile payment service lets users create accounts with their phone numbers. It makes things a bit more convenient and for the time being, this small platform allows very fast transfers compared to its parent service, PayPal.

That being said, its social media-like quality makes it appealing, though maybe too transparent at times. You might want to fiddle with the privacy settings before letting everyone know who you sent money too, how many times, and how much. It’s a lot easier than having to block/unblock people individually.