If someone with millions or billions of dollars doesn’t have an official API after operating for years, that’s because they don’t want to have one. You may receive a Cease and Desist letter, or they might block your IPs, or just scramble their markup in ways that are hard to figure out. Whatever their approach, they likely have more money and manpower to throw at stopping you than you have to evade them, especially if you’re doing this to multiple large and powerful companies.
I don't like this trend of small time OSS devs being berated about legal bullying from megacorps, meanwhile handsomely VC-funded businesses get congratulated with legal help. We should be berating these companies of not releasing the APIs that people want to use!
We're in an age of AI, built atop agents, agents built atop APIs. APIs were the promise of Web 2.0, a promise being ripped away from us more and more by the day by these megacorps.
There should be a SPECIFIC legal funds/OSS unions protecting these Adversarial Interoperability projects and their maintainers from legal threat harassment by megacorps.
Just in the last 2 years we've had multiple near/passed-trillion dollar companies sending legal threats to OSS devs who have to fight them off on their own - one of them 15 years old.
Thank you alanalanlu and richardyhz for this project. Godspeed! And screw Venmo if they dare go after these two maintainers and their project!
Will Integruru support you in your legal fight in court?
Most devs aren't ready to lawyer up.
Then you post the cease and desist letter on your website, and post about it on hacker news.
Very risky business.
The likelihood of things breaking or behaving in unexpected ways are data points I think about when assessing risk irrespective of whether an API is public or not. In some industries even the public APIs are more risky than using the unofficial Venmo API likely is.
It's a third-party client making authentication and data collection requests, just like the hundreds of other credential stuffing toolkits (OpenBullet et al.) that are smashing the Venmo platform 24/7.
The most likely outcome for anyone using this is their account becoming restricted for unusual access patterns by the existing models already in place.
It's interesting to note, too, that the current Venmo website posts to https://account.venmo.com/api/eligibility to get a token and then separately to https://account.venmo.com/api/payments to perform the actual payment. Those endpoints and shapes are different than what's in the script, which posts to https://api.venmo.com/v1/payments (https://github.com/Integuru-AI/Venmo-Unofficial-API/blob/a28...). I wonder if the v1 API is an older one used for some other service (the mobile app, maybe?).
Thanks for sharing, OP.
I have heard from someone who worked there that (allegedly) one of the banks had a huge PI leak that was exposed to Plaid customers and (allegedly) nothing was done because Plaid didn't want to disclose their unofficial use.
From the integuru page:
> We build integrations with platforms lacking official APIs. We specialize in low-latency integrations via reverse-engineering. All integrations are open-source.
So these warnings are probably wasted on someone that is very much aware of what he is doing.
It's made by Y-combinator backed startup Taiki. The cofounders (who have names similar to the ones that made commits in the git repo) seem to be pretty experienced (Alibaba, and Amazon)[0]
Half of the respected users in this forum have websites like that.
it's not
It’s an easy thing to add to the README if it’s true. But if it’s not, that’s a problem.
I've personally noticed it tends to break a lot less than it used to.
i noted this in a previous thread with them, to which they replied if its your data you can access it which ever way you like. Which is like saying i can hack into my bankers computer remotely to view my account balance. Which is still illegal.
Using unapproved apis is unauthorized access to a computer or network, illegal in the US at least, which ever way you want to try and look at it
Remember both Plaid and Aaron Swartz did this, it can end if very different ways. Obviously the government can pick and choose who to send to jail, but that’s a risk
IMO, this should be standard procedure. If you don't want to provide the means to build greater things off of your product, expect that others will. It's a bit ironic, given that they're using open source libraries to build their product.
There’s no need to offer bad unsolicited legal advice on behalf of a mega corp. Just stop.
This is how you see spammers, scammers and grifters target people with fake bots on most platforms and the producer i.e. Venmo traces it to an SDK and will kill all these unofficial API consumers.
And once captchas are introduced it's over, I wouldn't be surprised if stuff like captchas would be implemented more into websites to stop scrapers for good.
Not really, seeing lots of captchas from Arkose, Cloudflare, HCaptcha, etc keep up with this in stopping bots.
lol, not really. Captcha solving services like DeathByCaptcha and AntiCaptcha cost like $1.90 per 1,000 successfully solved captchas. They have APIs and you can easily implement them into your existing code in a few lines.
tl;dr = captchas do nothing and they also do nothing to stop scrapers. its a non-issue.
source: I scrape a lot of things and defeat captchas daily.
PayPal Legal is going to love this