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venmo-auto-transfer

Working as of 2023-01-08, may break in future

As a: Venmo user

I want: Payments to deposit into my Venmo balance instead of my bank account

So that: I can avoid the complexities of a traditional financial institution, such as being FDIC-insured and earning interest, and add spice to my life by randomly being locked out of my money from time to time

—Venmo product manager, probably

This is a simple application which uses a reverse-engineered client for the internal Venmo web API to automatically deposit your Venmo balance into your bank account. This option is available for free within the Venmo app or website at any time, but (unlike with similar apps) there is no way to set payments to deposit into your bank account automatically. This is because Venmo makes a profit at your expense when you leave your money with them, and they have a business incentive to make it inconvenient to be fiscally responsible.

Dependencies

This is a pure Python application using Poetry for dependency management. You need only have Python 3 and Poetry installed.

Usage

First you'll need to create a file called .env in your local copy of this repository, with the following contents:

VENMO_USERNAME=
VENMO_PASSWORD=
VENMO_BANK_ACCOUNT_NUMBER=

You should fill in your Venmo username and password after the equals signs, and include the account number of your 2FA bank account on the third line. Note: to find out which bank account is your 2FA bank account, log in to Venmo in a private browsing window and click Confirm another way on the 2FA screen. Venmo will prompt you with the name of the bank account it expects.

Now you should be able to invoke ./venmo_auto_transfer.bash and see your Venmo balance printed. If there is an issue with authentication then this command will fail and you will have to debug it. This application has not been tested with different types of accounts so it is hard to say whether it will work in general.

If you invoke ./venmo_auto_transfer.bash -t, then not only will your balance be printed, but if it is nonzero, then it will be transferred to whichever linked bank account is marked as the default for bank transfers (likely the same as your 2FA bank, but not necessarily).

Note that this script is set to work for your PERSONAL Venmo account; any linked business accounts are ignored.

Suggested deployment

I would recommend running ./venmo_auto_transfer.bash -t on a cron job on your personal computer once a day or so. You'd best avoid using a cloud server because such IPs are easily blocked by Venmo and you want the traffic to look relatively organic (they can't block your IP without blocking your actual usage).

You can set up an account on Healthchecks.io and put your healthcheck URL in WEBHOOK_URL= in the .env file. This will cause the script to notify Healthchecks.io automatically on a successful run, and you can get an email notification if the script starts failing for too many days in a row (e.g., due to a Venmo API change).

Limitations

This will generate a Sign-in attempt from new device email from Venmo every time the script runs. I suggest you create a filter for them, though this obviously has a security drawback. It's not your fault though, it's Venmo's fault for implementing the anti-feature that led to this script's necessity in the first place.

Troubleshooting

In order to avoid tripping rate limits related to authentication, the application has an option to reuse an existing API token that was generated from a previous login attempt. Note that Venmo API tokens expire relatively quickly (often within a few hours) and there is no check for validity within the script, so an expired token will likely lead to an authentication error (4xx, but not necessarily 401 or 403 like you might expect).

To get the script to print the access token, run it with -v. (This is not done by default for security reasons.) Then, put VENMO_ACCESS_TOKEN= in the .env file; the presence of a nonempty value for this environment variable will override any other configuration.

Implementation notes

  • Venmo has a very loose relationship with correct use of HTTP status codes. The most likely result of omitting a required header or setting it to the wrong value is a 403 from CloudFront or nginx (if the error is particular egregious, like having a denylisted user-agent string) or a 404 (if you fail authentication or something similar). The fact that 404s are used for a variety of blocked request types is quite annoying.
  • Many pages in the Venmo web interface appear to be loaded via Next.js and have support for both dynamic loading of additional data (à la SPA) as well as loading a server-side rendered page from scratch. So depending on what manner you navigate in, data used for page rendering might appear in different places. The way that's easier to parse is if you load the page from scratch; in that case there's a gigantic JSON object in the __NEXT_DATA__ script tag at the bottom of the page which has all the relevant info.
  • Venmo uses CSRF tokens extensively. There appear to be two separate CSRF tokens you have to submit with many requests: one that is set by the server as a cookie, and the other that is provided as part of the Next.js configuration in a JSON object in the HTML response (or a Next.js async chunk) and must be sent as an HTTP header.
  • Marking a client as trusted (so it will not require 2FA again) appears to be a rather complex process. It's not just saving a cookie client-side; you have to do a GraphQL call to mutate some server-side data structure of trusted devices, and there are multiple analytics and tracking calls for recording various device telemetry which may or may not also be required. This implementation avoids the complexity, since there is a 2FA method available that does not require the user to be present, and since you have to re-login anyway after a few hours to refresh your API token, regardless of how trusted your device is. (The mobile app probably has a stronger authentication mechanism since you don't have to repeatedly sign in to that, but it would also be more of a pain to reverse engineer.)
  • If you hit the 2FA endpoint too many times in a short period, you will get rate limited and Venmo will start reporting a bogus error message about your bank account number being invalid. Try again the next day.

See also

There is a much more full featured Venmo API client here with a similar command-line transfer interface here!