So I do know that they apparently use it for anti-money laundering purposes. I learned that once when writing a request to some friends along the lines of "food from south of North Korea", causing them to flag my friends' payments to me because mentioning the string "North Korea" must have meant that I was secretly laundering money that way. Stupidly, Venmo required that my friends explain their transactions, not me, the requester.

So the lesson is, you can put jokes into your Venmo payments, but not jokes that imply that you're blatantly laundering money.

I guess my point is what adtech firm is going to be interested in a person who pays for electricity? Everyone does that. I pay for water too, but that's not going to help anyone sell me stuff.