If you’re reading this then you probably received an e-mail from Venmo indicating that your account has been frozen. This usually happens because of a failed payment which can result in your account being flagged as a security measure. While its certainly not convenient, these measures are taken to help protect Venmo users. Most importantly, they are not often permanent and there are steps you can take to unfreeze your account.
1. How to Unfreeze Venmo Account – Contact Support
The first step you can take is to reply to the e-mail you received notifying you that your account was frozen which will usually have details on why the account was frozen in the first place. As noted above, sometimes your account could be frozen due to concerns about your account activity. In this instance you can reply to the e-mail you received addressing the stated concerns directly. Alternatively you can contact support at support@venmo.com. Of all the ways of figuring out how to unfreeze Venmo account, this is the most direct. The drawback of this approach is that Venmo might not have a lot of helpful information on what caused the transaction(s) in question to not go through.
2. How to Unfreeze Venmo Account – Contact Your Bank
Often Venmo might block your account due to failed bank payments. This can occur for a number of reasons which Venmo might not even be privy to in fact, including insufficient funds in your connected bank account or transaction limits being breached on your connected account. Rectifying these failed payments can lead to your account being unfrozen. Said another way, by contacting your bank to understand why they refused the transaction you can figure out how to unfreeze Venmo account. To be clear you will need to ensure that the payment gets made. Contacting your bank just allows you to identify what the issue is.
3. How to Unfreeze Venmo Account – Use the Venmo App
The third step you can take to unfreeze your Venmo Account is to use the app itself. After your account has been frozen, when you open the app you will receive prompts within the app that you can follow to figure out how to resolve the issue. Alternatively, you can visit Venmo’s Recover Page and follow the prompts on that page.
Need to Unfreeze Venmo Account But Don’t Have Funds
For consumers that find themselves in this situation, Venmo has set up a mechanism to allow you to make partial payments. All you have to do is click on the repayment amount (which will be the full amount) when you’re in the Venmo app and before selecting “Pay”, change the payment amount to the lower amount that you can pay. Your account won’t be unfrozen until the full amount has been paid.
Final Thoughts
The important point to remember is that because in many cases Venmo accounts get frozen due to an issue with payment, knowing how to unfreeze Venmo account will always come down to resolving the payment that failed. For this reason we think the first step should be to contact your bank as they’ll be able to give you details about why the bank payment failed. Venmo has said that the fastest way to have a frozen account unfrozen is to use a debit card to pay back the amount owed. You can of course use your connected bank account but this takes longer and therefore your account can remain frozen for several days as the payment is getting processed. You can monitor the status of your payment by clicking on “Account Recovery Payment” in your transaction history. As a final note, this is an issue that is less of a concern with Zelle because by its very nature if your bank or credit union partners with Zelle then your bank account is automatically linked to the Zelle network.