Probably due to the paypal horror stories; note that Paypal acquired Venmo in their Braintree acquisition: https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/19/venmo-now-lets-you-find-an...

Venmo doesn't offer 2fa with an authenticator app. Only text message 2fa. Leaves you open to sim swap attacks, which are common and the carriers are doing nothing to prevent.

PayPal has a long shiny history of screwing people over and Venmo is now not only owned by PayPal but the app is hot garbage and gets worse with every update (probably due to the aforementioned ownership).

I use PayPal, not as heavily as I have in the past, but I have been scammed by about a dozen sellers, and in all cases, PayPal refunded my money. I've never heard of PayPal screwing over customers, only that it being owned by eBay is annoying because eBay gets two sets of fees on payments for sellers.

I don't care enough to find the biggest stories over the last 15+ years but here are two articles from January 2022 referencing a class action lawsuit over freezing of funds without explanation:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/01/paypal-stole-use...

https://www.engadget.com/paypal-lawsuit-freezing-customer-ac...

And to be clear, this is not an isolated event.

Paypal is entirely reasonable as buyer. But I would never ever use it to receive money. Or hold balance there.

PayPal is known for keeping your money at length or indefinitely with no explanation or recourse.

Venmo is a mindbogglingly stupid thing that requires you to take active steps just to keep it from broadcasting your financial activity to the world, and last I checked there was no way to keep your "friend list" from being public at all.

On top of that there was a period where they disabled transfer functionality on their website altogether and the only way you could send money was through their proprietary mobile app. Seems they eventually reversed course on this, but I have no idea how long it took.