Venmo offers personal accounts and authorized business accounts. If the owner has a lot of people paying him, he may look like a business, but is not authorized as a business. They could also be fraudulent, but that is less likely.
Also, Venmo might have gotten in the middle of a dispute with this owner and a prior renter. That could have happened a lot with all the cancellations due to Covid and all the contracts saying :"non-refundable".
I already have my confirmation number in mde and it has our trip I am renting in there w the correct days and names. He couldn’t do that if it was fake right?
I don't have a lot of experience with Venmo but it seems they have a limit to the amount of money that can be sent person to person ($4,999.99). That figure is both weekly and daily. It's possible the recipient may have made other transactions this week that is setting them over the limit.
I already have my confirmation number in mde and it has our trip I am renting in there w the correct days and names. He couldn’t do that if it was fake right?
If you have a valid reservation, then he has DVC points to have booked it. However, he can cancel that up until the day you actually check in..
but so can any owner who you rent from after you pay them.
From the little I have tried to find out, it sounds like there is an issue on his end..there could be either complaints against him or he may have been flagged as running a business via personal, or something else, like his account has exceeded friends and family limits.
I already have my confirmation number in mde and it has our trip I am renting in there w the correct days and names. He couldn’t do that if it was fake right?
Well, it's possible but not probable. A scammer could take your info, give it to a legitimate DVC owner to book a reservation. Then they turn around and email you the confirmation number which will work in MDE. They collect your money but never pay the true owner. The true owner then cancels the reservation because they never got paid.
If you did your due diligence, checked references, spoke directly with the owner and ensured that the name on the membership and the name on the Venmo account are the same, then it's highly unlikely that the above scenario is the case. More likely, there's an issue between the owner and PayPal/Venmo. My money is on either the case outlined by @miTnosnhoJ or the over-limit mentioned by @WNYDisneyDad.
I spoke with someone else who used Venmo with him this morning and it worked. I guess they are flagging it on my end for some reason. I wish they would take it off I really want this reservation!
Venmo may NOT otherwise be used to receive business, commercial or merchant transactions, meaning you CANNOT use Venmo to accept payment from (or send payment to) another user for a good or service, unless explicitly authorized by Venmo.
Wouldn't it make sense to just contact venmo to see what the issue is and get it straightened out? If it's bc they think it could be someone fraudulently accessing your account, a simple verification could get it lifted.
Venmo is owned by PayPal. The flag could very well carry over. Just call before the owner decides to cancel the reservation and move on.
Contacting Venmo does no good. They tell you they can’t not see why the payment it being red flagged and they can do nothing to change it. The only thing the recommend doing it trying again, using PayPal, or using another payment source.