Venmo is the magical app that makes it possible for us to instantly pay for wine at a friend’s members-only club without being a member – two clicks on your phone and you’ve bought the next bottle. It is, you could say, a

But, the Federal Trade Commission has received a number of complaints about how Venom treats our money and our transactions, and filed a lawsuit against PayPal, which now owns the operation. Today there’s a proposed settlement and the company promises to make its policies clear, but we’re here to help.

Your Venmo account is connected to your bank account, credit card or debit card, but money people pay you isn’t automatically sent there. When someone pays you through Venmo, it goes into your Venmo account. You have to transfer it to your bank account but get this, Venmo waits until you make this transfer to review the transaction for fraud or insufficient funds. Guess what? If you wait too much time to transfer the money, that’s exactly what might happen and you won’t see your dollars after all. Sometimes Venmo will reverse that transitions.

Those delays and losses led thousands of consumers to complain to Venmo. Many people reported that the company’s practices resulted in significant financial hardship – for example, not being able to pay their rent even though it appeared they had enough in their Venmo account to cover it. The FTC says that even in the face of mounting consumer complaints, Venmo continued to claim – without any qualifiers – that once money was credited to consumers’ Venmo accounts, users could transfer it to their bank accounts.

Consumers’ access to funds wasn’t the government’s only concern. By default, transactions on Venmo are displayed on Venmo’s social news feed. That includes the names of the payer and the recipient, and the accompanying message. In addition, each Venmo user has a profile page that lists their Venmo transactions. By default, their five most recent ones were visible to anyone on that page, including visitors who don’t have a Venmo account. Even people without an account could still see a user’s Venmo account either by clicking on a link to the user’s Venmo profile page or by using a search engine.

If you don’t want to share your transactions, you could go to a Venmo menu to edit the privacy settings. But the problem, is that the person you’re transacting with may not limit their settings, so it shows up anyway. To ensure that their transactions remained at their chosen default visibility, consumers had to take a second inadequately disclosed step involving what was called the “Transaction Sharing Setting.” If people didn’t change both settings, some of their transactions remained visible.