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Comment by tpae | Hacker News Reader

Hey there, I'm currently banned from PayPal, and I actually went through what you did.

I filed an arbitration using a service called FairShake (https://fairshake.com/), and finally they decided to settle with me. They said they will give me my money, but I can no longer use any of their services including Venmo. I agreed and took the money.

Happy to answer any questions regarding my experience, feel free to telegram me @tdpae

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I’ve gotten around venmo bans with a new email address, new card, and staying under the KYC transaction size limit

actually not necessarily even a new card if you’ve used AMEX Send thats valid in lieu of the exact same AMEX Card it was linked to

What you're doing may be considered "structuring" [1], which under the demented laws of the US can land you in jail.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring

Cute, fortunately structuring relies on avoiding regulatory thresholds for reporting and the KYC threshold that venmo sets is a completely arbitrary company policy that has nothing to do with the law and has nothing to do with reporting that a licensed financial institution needs to do or for reporting to a regulator

Thanks for your concern, this is just circumventing a dark pattern of poor UX

The law on structuring (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5324) is about evading the $10,000 reporting threshold for financial institutions taking cash deposits or businesses taking cash payments for goods/services. If they are perpetuating some kind of fraud on Venmo making multiple accounts to do so in violation of the ToS is maybe wire fraud (so is just about everything) but by itself is probably not illegal.

Did they ever give an explanation for the ban or was it some no answer like "please review the terms and conditions"?

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