calrueb

Today alone I have got emails from 6 different services informing me they updated their terms of service. Is this to get ready for new laws in 2023, or something else?

This morning I woke up to an email from Venmo titled "Your Venmo Account". At first I figured I was being phished, but I opened it up, and found the following

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[...]

On October 31, 2022, you sent a payment for the amount of $48.59 for, "Cuban date." We're trying to understand:

   * your reference to "Cuban."
 
   * purpose of this payment, including a complete and detailed explanation of what you intended to pay for and the establishment/location if applicable.

To submit your documentation, please use Venmo's Secure web form: [...]

We thank you for your attention to this matter and apologize for any inconvenience. Your payment has been held until the issue is resolved, so we're unable to cancel it. This hold cannot be removed until Venmo receives the requested information that will enable us to ensure our compliance with our regulatory obligations.

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This is a real, private transaction I sent my girlfriend to split a dinner we had last week. We went to a Cuban restaurant in San Francisco.

I have been a Venmo user for at least 6 years. I have done 100s of transactions, including dozens with my girlfriend. I am annoyed that I now have to go through an opaque, bureaucratic process to get my transaction unlocked. If I knew my Venmo transaction descriptions could trigger fraud checks I would have simply said "date night". This experience has left a bad taste in my mouth, and I will be considering alternatives. At the minimum, I will be leaving my Venmo descriptions blank or vague!

Sometimes when I am bored I like to pick up unknown caller/spam calls just to see what they are peddling, and this morning I was in one of those moods. However, when I answered I was surprised to hear a real person on the other end of the line that knew my name, my employer, and my role. They were trying to sell me on their startup product which is aimed at people in my position.

I was quite surprised how he had all this information on me, and I asked where he got my phone number thinking perhaps we have a mutual connection that put us in touch. Instead, he said he found me and my phone number on LinkedIn. We had a bit of back-and-forth, and I politely ended the call.

I have double checked, and there is no phone number connected to my LinkedIn account. Instead, I suspect this seller has some sort of Chrome extension which is adding extra contact info metadata to public LinkedIn profiles. With that, a seller can look for people with my job title, and then use that contact info to do cold outreach.

Is that likely what happened in this case, or is there another avenue I am not considering? How might I prevent these creepy calls in the future? I suspect if there are 1-2 large players who offer this service I could ask them to delete my data. I don't want to delete my LinkedIn account over this as I have found it relatively handy.