Empowering Sponsors & Teens with Enhanced Reporting Tools

April 25, 2025

To further our mission of keeping customers safe, Cash App enhanced its Account Reporting feature, now giving both teens and their sponsors the ability to provide more detail when reporting inappropriate or unwanted activity. With a customer-centric, user-friendly reporting flow, we will optimize our ability to proactively prevent, detect and take action on harmful activity, and protect our customers from potential harassment, sextortion, and child sexual exploitation (CSE).

Why Account Reporting Matters

The Reporting feature serves to empower sponsors—who oversee their teen’s transactions, and teens to report any concerning activity with a relevant category, as well as an opportunity to provide more detail with a written explanation. This allows us to identify, understand, prioritize and investigate potential abuse and misuse of our platform. Beyond improving our investigations, confirmed reports are used by our Machine Learning teams as a means to train and retrain our child protection detections; every confirmed report is an opportunity to optimize our automated systems, which aim to prevent these types of interactions in real-time in the future.

Our Reporting feature was designed with teen users in mind, incorporating several key features that make it both accessible and effective:

• Minor-Friendly Language: The reporting flow uses clear, age-appropriate language that teens can easily understand and navigate.
• Easy Accessibility: Reports can be made within just a few clicks, ensuring that teens can quickly access help when needed.
• Comprehensive Response Protocol:
  • When concerning activity is reported, it triggers an internal review by employees with specialized expertise to detect and identify activity
  • Cases involving potential CSE are reported to NCMEC's CyberTipline
  • Law enforcement is engaged when necessary
  • Teens are connected with crucial support resources

Continuous Improvement

With these enhancements, Cash App has:

• Improved the ability for customers to report bad activity by introducing more contextual entry points.
• Improved proactive internal detections, leveraging the reporting mechanism.

Empowered sponsors to report concerning transactions in the Family Applet, strengthening safety measures for teen users.

As with all our products and features, we plan to refine the Reporting feature based on real-world usage and feedback by:

• Monitoring reporting trends and abuse patterns.
• Working closely with Compliance Operations to ensure reports are reviewed effectively and timely.
• Gradually expanding reporting reasons to balance thoroughness with efficiency.

The Enriched Account Reporting marks another step forward in creating a safer, more secure Cash App experience for teens and their sponsors. By increasing the volume and quality of reports, we can refine our detection models, prevent harmful transactions, and build a more robust, protective environment for all customers.