A Third Of Millennials Have Used Venmo To Buy Drugs

While Paypal Holdings Inc PYPL mobile payment app Venmo continues to grow and is on track to process over $20 billion in payments this year, the application has become a medium of suspicious transactions for millennials.

In a recent study by LendEDU, nearly a third of millennial respondents said they have used Venmo to pay for drugs. Twenty-one percent of respondents also said they used Venmo for betting or to square up gambling debts.

Venmo has been growing quickly; it processed $7.5 billion in transactions in 2015 and nearly $3.2 billion in the first quarter of 2017 alone. In the first quarter of 2017, Venmo processed 6.8 billion transactions, more than double the amount of volume produced a year prior.

Venmo has become the go-to medium to make shady transactions, but for those who use it for such, they run the risk of leaving behind a paper trail that could come back to haunt them, as all transactions on Venom are kept on file, similar to credit card transactions.

The task for engineers at Venmo to monitor transactions and flag payments that look suspicious is a daunting one at this point; it is unclear what Venmo can do to combat this widespread issue.

With how easy Venmo has made payments, it's all but certain issues like this would surface. Now, the question becomes how they can combat the problem before it starts to threaten the platform.