How easy is it to figure out a way to gain access to the finances of the most powerful man in the world? The unfortunate and shocking answer is “about 10 minutes easy” — at least, that is how long it took Buzzfeed to locate the private and secret Venmo account of Joe Biden.
Hackers are increasingly targeting payment apps like Cash App, Venmo, and more. In fact, recently, popular poker players Daniel Negreanu and Erik Seidel found their accounts hacked and bled dry. One teen found her entire college savings stolen after a hacker got into her account. Venmo is not a safe platform by any means, and it’s very bad if the President’s is easily found or well-known.
Unfortunately for Joe Biden, it only took Buzzfeed 10 minutes to locate his account. Had they been malicious hackers, they could have gotten into the account of the President of the United States. Buzzfeed reports:
BuzzFeed News found President Joe Biden’s Venmo account after less than 10 minutes of looking for it, revealing a network of his private social connections, a national security issue for the United States, and a major privacy concern for everyone who uses the popular peer-to-peer payments app.
On Friday, following a passing mention in the New York Times that the president had sent his grandchildren money on Venmo, BuzzFeed News searched for the president’s account using only a combination of the app’s built-in search tool and public friends feature. In the process, BuzzFeed News found nearly a dozen Biden family members and mapped out a social web that encompasses not only the first family, but a wide network of people around them, including the president’s children, grandchildren, senior White House officials, and all of their contacts on Venmo.
The president’s transactions are not public, and BuzzFeed News is not identifying the usernames for the accounts mentioned in this story due to national security concerns.
“The safety and privacy of all Venmo users and their information is always a top priority, and we take this responsibility very seriously,” Venmo said in a statement about Biden’s account. “Customers always have the ability to make their transactions private and determine their own privacy settings in the app. We’re consistently evolving and strengthening the privacy measures for all Venmo users to continue to provide a safe, secure place to send and spend money.”
But Venmo accounts are hacked regularly, and the company doesn’t exactly have a good reputation when it comes to fixing it. If Joe Biden is so lax with security on a payment app that is linked to his bank account, what else isn’t he careful about? His refusal to take his personal security seriously raises serious doubts about his ability to take out country’s seriously. Fortunately, no one that we know of got into his account — but the situation could have been much worse.