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“1M Syrian customers, do you think they will ever forget Western Union?”
- revelation 9y agoWhat a nice propaganda piece on Western Union, enabler of scammers worldwide and reliably preying on those disenfranchised parts of the human population we've decided can't have debit accounts.
- fastball 9y agoSo you think humanity has a primary right to bank accounts? You want to force private entities (banks) to work with an obviously unreliable subset of the population? How do you prevent money laundering if you can't reasonably identify your clients? What exactly is your solution?
- revelation 9y agoSolution? To what exact problem for crying shame? You must be highly delusional to think refugees are the money laundering kingpins. And of course there are steps underway to ensure everyone can have a basic debit account: http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/financial_services/bank_accounts/index_en.htm http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/financial_services/bank_accoun... It's no different from access to water, housing, electricity, information, ..
- ginko 9y ago>So you think humanity has a primary right to bank accounts? You want to force private entities (banks) to work with an obviously unreliable subset of the population? Yeah, that's what's already the case here in Austria. It essentially means that if you don't have a bank account (and you're not in an ongoing litigation with the bank in question), then a bank MUST accept your application for a basic bank account. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedermann-Konto https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedermann-Konto
- theWatcher37 9y agoThat is idiotic. The state forcing a business to accept a customer no matter their records?
- evook 9y agoYes, also in Germany.
- hk__2 9y agoIt’s a simple account where all you can do is put money and get it back. There’s no overdraft. We have the same law in France and the EU recently passed a similar directive.
- sitepodmatt 9y agoThat same state and other federal employers probably also mandate recipients of welfare or wages must be paid into a bank account. They get the upside of this so universal access to a basic bank account is a far compromise. Its insane imo that im forced to do business with a private bank for practically 99% of jobs including those of my own government.
- jacquesm 9y ago> The state forcing a business to accept a customer no matter their records? The same with health insurance no matter what your prior situation is. This sort of arrangement is very common for things the government thinks are 'must haves' in order to participate in society.
- bildung 9y agoYes, society decided that the bank is allowed participate in the market that itself is based on public (and publicly financed) infrastructure, if and only if certain conditions are met. The bank's owners are free to accept or shift capital into another industry.
- amluto 9y agoOther industries have a word for this: "common carrier" or "regulated utility". Your electric utility can't kick you out just because they don't like you.
- MichaelGG 9y agoPreventing money laundering should be an anti goal. It puts a huge burden on everyone to prevent a victimless crime just to make prosecutors' lives' easier.
- chillydawg 9y agoMoney laundering a victimless crime? Where do you think that money comes from?
- jessaustin 9y agoMostly, other victimless crimes. Drug imports, gambling, etc.
- unnamedoutsider 9y ago"victimless crimes. Drug imports, gambling" Is this satire?
- isubkhankulov 9y agowhat about apple gift cards? heavily used by scammers. are you attacking Apple because malicious users abuse their stored value cards?
- revelation 9y agoI don't know, what about Apple Gift Cards? And what, for that matter, about Samsung smartphones? What exactly is a non sequitur?
- khedoros1 9y agoIt's not a non sequitur; iTunes gift cards are also common instruments for scammers. They're also used legitimately, just like WU transfers are. The comparison is clear.
- revelation 9y agoAnd yet, somehow, that is not the point I'm making. You can bring up something without having to raise the entirety of trivia that may also fit that pattern, you know? So it's a non sequitur because obviously this is a thread on WesternUnion and they're bringing up Apple gift cards. It's like, cool, discuss that over there if you wish to.
- khedoros1 9y agoI see your point about WU being famously used for fraud. The point of bringing up Apple gift cards is to provide a counter-argument that WU's services aren't inherently bad, even when some of the uses they're put to are. They enable fraud, but only as an incidental consequence of providing services to the disenfranchised that no one else is.
- jacquesm 9y agoThere are whole swathes of humanity without bank accounts, for those people WU can be a lifeline. Not because they 'can't have debit accounts' but simply because there is no banking infrastructure where they live.
- valuearb 9y agoThe discussion of "typologies" doesn't discuss what happens when they trigger false positives. Essentially government pressure forces Western Union to be much more restrictive on it's compliance rules. Do they reject hundreds of transactions for each criminal transaction it catches? How much does this disenfranchise customers? Just one more step on the road to legitimizing bitcoins.
- diogenescynic 9y agoRemittances are horrible for Bitcoin. Most remittances are fairly small, so the Bitcoin fees alone are more expensive than just paying Western Union or another remittance service. Not to mention bitcoin being extremely inconvenient for the types of people who tend to use remittance services.
- RexetBlell 9y agoThings like Bitcoin might be horrible for remittances right now, but there is a lot of development in this space. For example, Ethereum is working on sharding to make it exponentially more scalable. The goal is that when sharding and proof of stake are completely finished, it will be possible to play something like Starcraft on Ethereum (super cheap transactions and 0.5 second block times). This is probably something like 10 years away, but it's coming.
- slackingoff2017 9y agoThe kind of people using these services are too poor or uneducated to transfer money using one of the many apps that already exist. The blockchain hype is insane, distributed transactions are pointless in most money transfer scenarios where existing systems work fine.
- diogenescynic 9y agoThat still only addresses half of the problem. How are you going to send Bitcoins to someone in a country where they don't have Internet? Cash is king in those places--hence remittance services like Western Union. Bitcoin is cool but it isn't a panacea and there are a lot of out of touch comments about its uses. You need to understand your customer and why they use a particular product before you can actually say whether Bitcoin or something else will actually be any benefit.
- readams 9y agoWestern Union is really good as a reliable indicator that a transaction is a scam.
- mjmahone17 9y agoSure: for someone with a bank account and who rarely has a reason to make international transactions, that's true, mainly because WU makes bank-free international money transfers easy. But that would be true of anyone you don't personally know asking you to send money internationally. But just because the majority of the time you see WU mentioned is for a scam doesn't mean the majority of transactions they are involved with are scams or fraud.
- belorn 9y agoReminds me how from a spam filter perspective, anything written in a non-native language is spam.
- jacquesm 9y agoI've used WU many times to get money to people in remote places. None of those transactions were scams.
- khedoros1 9y agoI think it's a matter of norms and expectations. I've got family in Honduras, and I would consider WU to send some money to them, if the need arose. I wouldn't consider it for a way to pay for something I was trying to buy on Ebay, and I think that's the perspective that a lot of the "SCAM!" comments are written from.
- ams6110 9y agoRight, the reason it's a scam flag is that there is no reversing or refunding a WU transfer. You have no protections like you do when paying by credit card.
- cjbenedikt 9y ago...and they are an "unreliable subset of the population" because...???
- wcummings 9y ago>A warrant application filed in the investigation detailed how “pickup operators”—middlemen who specialized in accepting and aggregating the transfers—would team with Western Union agents willing to overlook fake IDs in exchange for bribes and commissions. Let's be real, you don't need to bribe anyone to pass a fake ID at WU.
- jacquesm 9y agoThis is true. Usually all you need is the name of the recipient and the exact amount and they'll accept your signature.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- itissid 9y agoOn a side note, Remittances are a huge boon. The largest source of foreign direct investment(FDI) (by far) in India are remittances[1]. Even today, after many years of inflation, the PPP of my salary(affording me a middle class status here) here is 10-20 times of what it was,and would still be, in India. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India#Remittances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India#Remittances
- kcanini 9y agoWhere is "here"?
- cmac2992 9y agoInteresting to see all the hate in the comments. I don't really know much about WU except for what I experienced when I volunteered at a refugee camp on lesvos. Western Union was a lifeline for many people. It was very common for people to get sent $ from friends and family for a ticket to the mainland or for some supplies. Asking for directions to the western union was one of the most common questions I received.
- Animats 9y agoWestern Union today is not really a successor of the Western Union Telegraph Company. It's a unit of First Data, the first third-party processor of Visa and MasterCard transactions. First Data bought what was left of Western Union when the telegram business collapsed and WU went bust. First Data is a tech startup from the 1970s. If it involves payments, they probably have some service offering. They're bigger than PayPal.
- arunmib 9y agoI imagine that security would be a concern for WU locations at or near refugee camps, considering they need to stock the place with cash. Anyone have insights about how they handle it?
- fghafoor 9y agoDont understand the hate! WU has been pretty good to me and a lot of freelancers I know who can't get a bank account here (Pakistan) Clients can pay easily! Infact Google Adsense pays most international customers via WU without any fees!