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For years, according to the complaint, it was Walmart’s stated policy for its employees to issue payouts even in the case of a suspicious money transfer, making

For years, according to the complaint, it was Walmart’s stated policy for its employees to issue payouts even in the case of a suspicious money transfer, making it easy for scammers to retrieve fraud proceeds at a Walmart location. The complaint cites a Walmart reference guide for employees that stated: “If you suspect fraud, complete the transaction.” Wow!

hondo77 4y ago
And yet two commissioners voted "no". Wanna guess who appointed them?
- rmatt2000 4y ago
  Some people are philosophically opposed to turning private companies into arms of federal law enforcement agencies. That doesn't mean they are in favor of fraud.
  - stefan_ 4y ago
    There are people philosophically opposed to laws against facilitating fraud? In many cases, the fraudsters hired on with Walmart and the company profited from these transfers.
    - vivekd 4y ago
      I have a hard time believing that Walmart actually knew or intended for fraud to occur. I dont think they should be charged unless there is evidence they sought to facilitate fraud or violated some other law. These FTC regs are so vague they could charge any company for anything and I dont trust govt not to abuse that power
      - stefan_ 4y ago
        Only philosophical questions today! Who but the Walmart workers are Walmart? Of course the actions of their workers, in case they are fraudsters, are also the actions of Walmart, who graciously provided them it's infrastructure; it's complicity in the scam is what has to be established. In this case, the FTC found overt evidence that they were well aware of their complicity and chose to ignore it, across leadership. Hence this lawsuit. This is an obvious and necessary outcome; otherwise you could very well excuse just about any failing as just the legal misdeed of an isolated employee.
      - wpietri 4y ago
        I think the more useful standard here is "knew or should have known". They would have had to have been literal children to not ever hear that money transfer services could be useful to scammers. So assuming the executives were actual adults, they either knew or should have known that they were party to and profiting from large-scale fraud. For what it's worth, the FTC did not "charge" them with anything. Walmart is being sued for some pretty specific violations not of "regs" but of laws: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/1823012WalmartComplaint.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/1823012WalmartC... Walmart will have their day in court, and they certainly can afford plenty of lawyers. I have no concern at all for the well-remunerated executives at the top of this business, who will face no legal consequences for their personal profit from hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud.
        CodeSgt 4y ago
        Scam calls are also quite prolific, and the executives at big mobile companies are aware of this fact, that doesn't make them criminals. By your logic, virtually every single business owner on the planet would be guilty of whatever you're accusing the Walmart execs of. Cars, computers, paper, pens, phones, wire, etc etc etc. There are very few popular products or services that don't facilitate criminal/antisocial behavior in some capacity.
        wpietri 4y ago
        Where did I say they were criminals? The FTC doesn't think so. But there are important differences between scam calls and money transfer. The most obvious one is that big mobile companies don't profit significantly from scam calls. Another is that the big mobile companies are working quite aggressively to keep dubious callers off their networks. Consider, on the other hand, that assorted fly-by-night telecoms providers are scammer-friendly, in the same way that a small number of network providers are friendly to spam, child porn, and other criminal activity. Those people are, in the FTC's phrasing, turning a blind eye. I'd be fine with that being made illegal in the same way it's illegal to fence stolen goods.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - ceeplusplus 4y ago
    The answer is a lot simpler than that, which is that it looks good politically for them to oppose Democrats and voting no doesn't actually do anything so it's safe to do so. There are Republican AGs going after fraud cases all the time, you just don't read about it in national news.
  - thereare5lights 4y ago
    This concern > opposed to turning private companies into arms of federal law enforcement agencies. does not explain this policy > “If you suspect fraud, complete the transaction.” If there is suspicion of fraud and yet still direct your employees complete the transaction, sure, maybe you're not literally in favor of fraud. But it does mean that you don't care if there's fraud. There's little daylight between not caring about fraud and being in favor of it at Walmart's scale.
    - erikpukinskis 4y ago
      I think you're off a bit here. Not everyone is a fraud detection specialist. If Wal-mart had implemented the "trust your gut" policy you're advocating for, you're just going to get Ethiopian grandmas trying to cash out money from their grandkids and some random-ass Walmart employee deciding it's fraud because "she looks suspicious" or some nonsense and then she can't pay her rent. People should be trained to detect fraud if that's necessary. But saying "don't try to detect fraud" to random-ass employees whose job is not fraud detection seems eminently reasonable to me.
      - vkou 4y ago
        > People should be trained to detect fraud if that's necessary. But saying "don't try to detect fraud" to random-ass employees whose job is not fraud detection seems eminently reasonable to me. It's not reasonable because of the first sentence. If you're dealing with other people's money, your employees should be trained to detect fraud. If you can't be bothered to ensure that, you shouldn't be dealing with other people's money.
    - thfuran 4y ago
      This concern > opposed to turning private companies into arms of federal law enforcement agencies. does not explain this policy > “If you suspect fraud, complete the transaction.” Sure it does. It's not Walmart's job to investigate fraud or any other crime. Their cashier's aren't trained in jurisprudence. And, frankly, a corporate policy of "deny service to customers who you suspect might be up to no good" is just a few racist employees away from another shit show entirely.
  - nostromo 4y ago
    It wouldn’t surprise me if in a few years the same AGs sue Walmart and Western Union for allowing employees to suspect fraud for the wrong reasons and denying transactions.
    - kadoban 4y ago
      > for the wrong reasons Yes, they should probably be empowered to actually make decisions and trained to make them correctly. Is that asking so much?
      - geodel 4y ago
        Yeah it is asking too much. We have software engineers who couldn't write a sorry ass CRUD app while collecting $100K pa salaries. All the training and salary doesn't mean shit. With volume Walmart might be processing this kind of fraud is within cost of doing business.
        kadoban 4y ago
        Then Walmart shouldn't be in this business if it's literally impossible for them to train and employ the people necessary to do it somewhere in the neighborhood of correctly.
  - MBCook 4y ago
    Would you prefer their books have to be open to the government for inspection to look for the fraud?
    - Dan_Sylveste 4y ago
      That's the current reality.
- vaidhy 4y ago
  Should everything be driven down to partisan politics? There are tons of reasons why Walmart would not want its employees to be judge and jury in identifying fraud and some of the others would have felt that is the right approach.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    It doesn't even have to be partisan. Donald Trump could just like fraud. For example, consider the non-university Trump University, which was shut down and which Trump paid $25m to settle the lawsuits over: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University He in fact has a long history of stiffing contractors, mistreating workers, tax fraud, and other dodgy dealings: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/donald-trump-scandals/474726/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/donald-... Given that, it seems almost reasonable that he'd appoint business regulators who were ok with pretty much anything. It would be of a piece with his eagerness to make overseas bribery easier: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/business/economy/trump-bribery-law.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/business/economy/trump-br...
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yieldcrv 4y ago
That's because they can't tell. The alternative is many people's experience with a denial of service by a faceless fintech or paypal when they actually need it. Since Walmart was the readily available trading depot, manual reviews would waste too much time. They couldn't tell the difference between someone churning for credit card signup bonuses, someone that was actually the victim of a bounced check scam and didn't know it yet as they were sending a money order for the difference as instructed by their scammer, or an actual member of a drug gang intentionally being a money mule from a drug transaction.
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furyofantares 4y ago
I would expect cashiers suspecting fraud would have a high and probably discriminatory false positive rate. I wouldn't be surprised if it also sucked at detecting any actual fraud
- bastawhiz 4y ago
  I'd bet many cases were obvious. How many people told the employees they were paying IRS fees? Or that they had a long lost relative who contacted them? Many of these scams aren't sophisticated and the people falling for them are gullible. It's not hard to imagine that an employee with a bit more sense than the customer could have simply been told what's happening and realized it's probably illegitimate.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Walmart cashiers by and large are not sophisticated either. I mean that sounds harsh but these are not people walking in with a lot of financial savvy. Without training and reminders I would not think they would be any more likely to identify these scams than the victims are.
    - kadoban 4y ago
      Maybe they shouldn't be in that role then. Maybe Walmart should be expected to employ people in these roles who are paid and trained well enough to be able to pass a test like "can you spot the most obvious scam that has ever scammed, at least once in a while?"
      - listenallyall 4y ago
        Perhaps, as you suggest, Wal-Mart should hire high-paid, well-trained executives from PayPal, Zelle, CashApp, Venmo or other services. God knows there's never been fraudulent transactions or scams on those platforms. You obviously have a beef with Wal-Mart, writing essentially the same comment 4 times and seemingly ignoring the fact that virtually every supermarket and check-casher in the country has a similar employee running the Western Union desk.
omegalulw 4y ago
How does that manual pass even make it to employees hands?
KennyBlanken 4y ago
looks over at the Visa/Mastercard porn thread full of people lecturing us all about how corporations can't knowingly do business with people/companies breaking the law Huh.
- KMag 4y ago
  I'm not familiar with regulations on credit card organizations, but I would guess their responsibilities are closer to those of banks than Walmart's responsibilities. I spent more than a decade at an investment bank, and it's pretty heavily regulated.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  the issue with Visa/mastercard is not their near-monopoly status, so they can arbitrarily decide to sink your business. money transfer industry is not so consolidated.
kwonkicker 4y ago
This is preferable. I wouldn't trust a cashier to detect fraud in any trustworthy rate. That wording in the guideline is important. Suspicion of fraud is not fraud. Acting upon employee suspicion would just skyrocket costumer outbursts and complaints.
- kadoban 4y ago
  Then they should employ and train people in these roles who could be trusted to do that.
- CaptainZapp 4y ago
  In finance it's not that you pick up the phone and call the Money Laundering Hotline of the responsible regulator. What you do is you contact the internal compliance department where they have the specialists with the necessary knowledge who will further pursue it. That's drilled into every employee of a financial corporation. If Wallmart wants to be in the banking business it's not too much to ask to set up such a structure.
- jjeaff 4y ago
  Have the employee ask 3 questions. Are you paying to claim lottery winnings? Is a nigerian prince asking you to transfer money for them? Has someone you don't know deposited money in your bank account and needs you to wire cash to someone else? If the answer is yes to any of those, decline the transfer and give them a pamphlet on common scams. This would take care of about 90% of the problem.
  - FireBeyond 4y ago
    > If the answer is yes to any of those, decline the transfer and give them a pamphlet on common scams. This would take care of about 90% of the problem. Decline the transfer. You would be surprised on the latter though - people have walked their family through the scam, "No, I still think it's probably legit", even gotten police involved, "ma'am, these people online are scamming you", "But what if they're not?"
chewz 4y ago
Reminds of HSBC - look the othere way... > In a sprawling, low-rise building abutting pasture land in New Castle, Delaware, HSBC’s anti-money laundering staff review customer transactions and so-called alerts generated when the bank’s monitoring systems spot a suspicious transaction. > Former employees in the New Castle office describe a febrile boiler-room environment overseen by managers uninterested in investigating transactions with possible links to drug trafficking, terrorist financing, Iran and other countries under U.S. sanctions, and other illegal activities. Instead, they say, the single-minded focus was on clearing out the paperwork as fast as possible. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hsbc-compliance-delaware-idUSBRE86C18H20120714 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hsbc-compliance-delaware-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_Stern#HSBC_Money_laundering_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_Stern#HSBC_Money_laund...
- iasay 4y ago
  This is similar to how the city of London police financial crimes unit operate.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - chewz 4y ago
    Let's not forget about Danske Bank who laundered 200 bilion dollars in Russian money until get caught.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_Bank_money_laundering_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_Bank_money_laundering_s...
chinathrow 4y ago
> “If you suspect fraud, complete the transaction.” The person writing this should have walked away from this and report it. The person signing off on this as well.
anony999 4y ago
So the customers should be considered criminals until proven otherwise...smart FTC

hondo77 4y ago

And yet two commissioners voted "no". Wanna guess who appointed them?

rmatt2000 4y ago
Some people are philosophically opposed to turning private companies into arms of federal law enforcement agencies. That doesn't mean they are in favor of fraud.
- stefan_ 4y ago
  There are people philosophically opposed to laws against facilitating fraud? In many cases, the fraudsters hired on with Walmart and the company profited from these transfers.
  - vivekd 4y ago
    I have a hard time believing that Walmart actually knew or intended for fraud to occur. I dont think they should be charged unless there is evidence they sought to facilitate fraud or violated some other law. These FTC regs are so vague they could charge any company for anything and I dont trust govt not to abuse that power
    - stefan_ 4y ago
      Only philosophical questions today! Who but the Walmart workers are Walmart? Of course the actions of their workers, in case they are fraudsters, are also the actions of Walmart, who graciously provided them it's infrastructure; it's complicity in the scam is what has to be established. In this case, the FTC found overt evidence that they were well aware of their complicity and chose to ignore it, across leadership. Hence this lawsuit. This is an obvious and necessary outcome; otherwise you could very well excuse just about any failing as just the legal misdeed of an isolated employee.
    - wpietri 4y ago
      I think the more useful standard here is "knew or should have known". They would have had to have been literal children to not ever hear that money transfer services could be useful to scammers. So assuming the executives were actual adults, they either knew or should have known that they were party to and profiting from large-scale fraud. For what it's worth, the FTC did not "charge" them with anything. Walmart is being sued for some pretty specific violations not of "regs" but of laws: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/1823012WalmartComplaint.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/1823012WalmartC... Walmart will have their day in court, and they certainly can afford plenty of lawyers. I have no concern at all for the well-remunerated executives at the top of this business, who will face no legal consequences for their personal profit from hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud.
      - CodeSgt 4y ago
        Scam calls are also quite prolific, and the executives at big mobile companies are aware of this fact, that doesn't make them criminals. By your logic, virtually every single business owner on the planet would be guilty of whatever you're accusing the Walmart execs of. Cars, computers, paper, pens, phones, wire, etc etc etc. There are very few popular products or services that don't facilitate criminal/antisocial behavior in some capacity.
        wpietri 4y ago
        Where did I say they were criminals? The FTC doesn't think so. But there are important differences between scam calls and money transfer. The most obvious one is that big mobile companies don't profit significantly from scam calls. Another is that the big mobile companies are working quite aggressively to keep dubious callers off their networks. Consider, on the other hand, that assorted fly-by-night telecoms providers are scammer-friendly, in the same way that a small number of network providers are friendly to spam, child porn, and other criminal activity. Those people are, in the FTC's phrasing, turning a blind eye. I'd be fine with that being made illegal in the same way it's illegal to fence stolen goods.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ceeplusplus 4y ago
  The answer is a lot simpler than that, which is that it looks good politically for them to oppose Democrats and voting no doesn't actually do anything so it's safe to do so. There are Republican AGs going after fraud cases all the time, you just don't read about it in national news.
- thereare5lights 4y ago
  This concern > opposed to turning private companies into arms of federal law enforcement agencies. does not explain this policy > “If you suspect fraud, complete the transaction.” If there is suspicion of fraud and yet still direct your employees complete the transaction, sure, maybe you're not literally in favor of fraud. But it does mean that you don't care if there's fraud. There's little daylight between not caring about fraud and being in favor of it at Walmart's scale.
  - erikpukinskis 4y ago
    I think you're off a bit here. Not everyone is a fraud detection specialist. If Wal-mart had implemented the "trust your gut" policy you're advocating for, you're just going to get Ethiopian grandmas trying to cash out money from their grandkids and some random-ass Walmart employee deciding it's fraud because "she looks suspicious" or some nonsense and then she can't pay her rent. People should be trained to detect fraud if that's necessary. But saying "don't try to detect fraud" to random-ass employees whose job is not fraud detection seems eminently reasonable to me.
    - vkou 4y ago
      > People should be trained to detect fraud if that's necessary. But saying "don't try to detect fraud" to random-ass employees whose job is not fraud detection seems eminently reasonable to me. It's not reasonable because of the first sentence. If you're dealing with other people's money, your employees should be trained to detect fraud. If you can't be bothered to ensure that, you shouldn't be dealing with other people's money.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    This concern > opposed to turning private companies into arms of federal law enforcement agencies. does not explain this policy > “If you suspect fraud, complete the transaction.” Sure it does. It's not Walmart's job to investigate fraud or any other crime. Their cashier's aren't trained in jurisprudence. And, frankly, a corporate policy of "deny service to customers who you suspect might be up to no good" is just a few racist employees away from another shit show entirely.
- nostromo 4y ago
  It wouldn’t surprise me if in a few years the same AGs sue Walmart and Western Union for allowing employees to suspect fraud for the wrong reasons and denying transactions.
  - kadoban 4y ago
    > for the wrong reasons Yes, they should probably be empowered to actually make decisions and trained to make them correctly. Is that asking so much?
    - geodel 4y ago
      Yeah it is asking too much. We have software engineers who couldn't write a sorry ass CRUD app while collecting $100K pa salaries. All the training and salary doesn't mean shit. With volume Walmart might be processing this kind of fraud is within cost of doing business.
      - kadoban 4y ago
        Then Walmart shouldn't be in this business if it's literally impossible for them to train and employ the people necessary to do it somewhere in the neighborhood of correctly.
- MBCook 4y ago
  Would you prefer their books have to be open to the government for inspection to look for the fraud?
  - Dan_Sylveste 4y ago
    That's the current reality.
vaidhy 4y ago
Should everything be driven down to partisan politics? There are tons of reasons why Walmart would not want its employees to be judge and jury in identifying fraud and some of the others would have felt that is the right approach.
- wpietri 4y ago
  It doesn't even have to be partisan. Donald Trump could just like fraud. For example, consider the non-university Trump University, which was shut down and which Trump paid $25m to settle the lawsuits over: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University He in fact has a long history of stiffing contractors, mistreating workers, tax fraud, and other dodgy dealings: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/donald-trump-scandals/474726/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/donald-... Given that, it seems almost reasonable that he'd appoint business regulators who were ok with pretty much anything. It would be of a piece with his eagerness to make overseas bribery easier: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/business/economy/trump-bribery-law.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/business/economy/trump-br...

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[deleted]

yieldcrv 4y ago

That's because they can't tell. The alternative is many people's experience with a denial of service by a faceless fintech or paypal when they actually need it. Since Walmart was the readily available trading depot, manual reviews would waste too much time. They couldn't tell the difference between someone churning for credit card signup bonuses, someone that was actually the victim of a bounced check scam and didn't know it yet as they were sending a money order for the difference as instructed by their scammer, or an actual member of a drug gang intentionally being a money mule from a drug transaction.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

furyofantares 4y ago

I would expect cashiers suspecting fraud would have a high and probably discriminatory false positive rate. I wouldn't be surprised if it also sucked at detecting any actual fraud

bastawhiz 4y ago
I'd bet many cases were obvious. How many people told the employees they were paying IRS fees? Or that they had a long lost relative who contacted them? Many of these scams aren't sophisticated and the people falling for them are gullible. It's not hard to imagine that an employee with a bit more sense than the customer could have simply been told what's happening and realized it's probably illegitimate.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  Walmart cashiers by and large are not sophisticated either. I mean that sounds harsh but these are not people walking in with a lot of financial savvy. Without training and reminders I would not think they would be any more likely to identify these scams than the victims are.
  - kadoban 4y ago
    Maybe they shouldn't be in that role then. Maybe Walmart should be expected to employ people in these roles who are paid and trained well enough to be able to pass a test like "can you spot the most obvious scam that has ever scammed, at least once in a while?"
    - listenallyall 4y ago
      Perhaps, as you suggest, Wal-Mart should hire high-paid, well-trained executives from PayPal, Zelle, CashApp, Venmo or other services. God knows there's never been fraudulent transactions or scams on those platforms. You obviously have a beef with Wal-Mart, writing essentially the same comment 4 times and seemingly ignoring the fact that virtually every supermarket and check-casher in the country has a similar employee running the Western Union desk.

omegalulw 4y ago

How does that manual pass even make it to employees hands?

KennyBlanken 4y ago

looks over at the Visa/Mastercard porn thread full of people lecturing us all about how corporations can't knowingly do business with people/companies breaking the law Huh.

KMag 4y ago
I'm not familiar with regulations on credit card organizations, but I would guess their responsibilities are closer to those of banks than Walmart's responsibilities. I spent more than a decade at an investment bank, and it's pretty heavily regulated.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
the issue with Visa/mastercard is not their near-monopoly status, so they can arbitrarily decide to sink your business. money transfer industry is not so consolidated.

kwonkicker 4y ago

This is preferable. I wouldn't trust a cashier to detect fraud in any trustworthy rate. That wording in the guideline is important. Suspicion of fraud is not fraud. Acting upon employee suspicion would just skyrocket costumer outbursts and complaints.

kadoban 4y ago
Then they should employ and train people in these roles who could be trusted to do that.
CaptainZapp 4y ago
In finance it's not that you pick up the phone and call the Money Laundering Hotline of the responsible regulator. What you do is you contact the internal compliance department where they have the specialists with the necessary knowledge who will further pursue it. That's drilled into every employee of a financial corporation. If Wallmart wants to be in the banking business it's not too much to ask to set up such a structure.
jjeaff 4y ago
Have the employee ask 3 questions. Are you paying to claim lottery winnings? Is a nigerian prince asking you to transfer money for them? Has someone you don't know deposited money in your bank account and needs you to wire cash to someone else? If the answer is yes to any of those, decline the transfer and give them a pamphlet on common scams. This would take care of about 90% of the problem.
- FireBeyond 4y ago
  > If the answer is yes to any of those, decline the transfer and give them a pamphlet on common scams. This would take care of about 90% of the problem. Decline the transfer. You would be surprised on the latter though - people have walked their family through the scam, "No, I still think it's probably legit", even gotten police involved, "ma'am, these people online are scamming you", "But what if they're not?"

chewz 4y ago

Reminds of HSBC - look the othere way... > In a sprawling, low-rise building abutting pasture land in New Castle, Delaware, HSBC’s anti-money laundering staff review customer transactions and so-called alerts generated when the bank’s monitoring systems spot a suspicious transaction. > Former employees in the New Castle office describe a febrile boiler-room environment overseen by managers uninterested in investigating transactions with possible links to drug trafficking, terrorist financing, Iran and other countries under U.S. sanctions, and other illegal activities. Instead, they say, the single-minded focus was on clearing out the paperwork as fast as possible. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hsbc-compliance-delaware-idUSBRE86C18H20120714 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hsbc-compliance-delaware-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_Stern#HSBC_Money_laundering_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_Stern#HSBC_Money_laund...

iasay 4y ago
This is similar to how the city of London police financial crimes unit operate.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- chewz 4y ago
  Let's not forget about Danske Bank who laundered 200 bilion dollars in Russian money until get caught.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_Bank_money_laundering_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_Bank_money_laundering_s...

chinathrow 4y ago

> “If you suspect fraud, complete the transaction.” The person writing this should have walked away from this and report it. The person signing off on this as well.

anony999 4y ago

So the customers should be considered criminals until proven otherwise...smart FTC