Given how often Western Union is the preferred method of money transfer nominated by 419 scammers, I was wondering whether Western Union offices display any kind of warning advising their clients about the 419 scam and how it operates.
I would assume that the company would wish to distance itself from the scam as much as possible, but I’ve been unable to locate any information about any public statements they might have made or any warnings they issue.
Does anyone know whether they train their staff to look out for possible 419 transfers, because it seems odd to me that they wouldn’t wish to do anything and everything possible to dissuade scammers from using their company for funds transfers but I can’t find any information which indicates that they actively discourage such use of their service.
Does WU get stuck with a chargeback if the victim complains? In the context in which I’ve heard of WU being the vehicle (Romanian scammers doing fake eBay sales on high-ticket electronics) there is no suggestion that WU sees themselves as owing you anything – and presumably they get to keep their commission on the wire.
WU also deals every day with people who are wiring sums of cash around the world – surely some of these transactions or their participants (not just the auction/419 frauds) would not stand much scrutiny from law enforcement or the press. So, if they are getting not suffering (and perhaps are actually benefiting) from 419/auction fraud, and if publicizing the inherently dodgy nature of parts of their business and clientele (or scaring off same) is a no win proposition, why would WU say or do anything much?
It is surprising even in the arenas where companies do bear part of the brunt of fraud just how uninterested they can seem in tracking down or stopping the fraudsters – even when it doesn’t seem that it would be that hard. On occasions when I’ve had credit cards stolen, and huge purchases run up within hours at what I’m pretty sure were bogus “merchants” who were in cahoots with the thieves (one of the “merchants” processed a $4,000 U.S. charge for “advertising services” at 2:45 a.m.), I asked my credit card company why they didn’t sic the authorities on the merchant, at least to investigate the circumstances of who made the charge, and whether they had many $4,000 dark-of-night advertising transactions). Their response (and keep in mind that they had just refunded me the entire amount of the bogus charge): “We really don’t have the resources to do that, and we can’t discuss it further because you’ve gotten your refund.” Same response when someone ordered three prepaid phones in my name and had them delivered to their house: “We can’t tell you where they were delivered, or whom they were used to call, because we’ve waived the charge to you.” The cynical view is that these companies simply pass the cost on, directly or indirectly, to the customer, so what’s their incentive to do the detective work, especially if it casts their business in a somewhat shady light (e.g., the cell phone cos. may not wish to call attention to just how useful cell phones are for drug dealers and the like).
Probably they are following up, they just aren’t about to release information to anyone other than the law-enforcement authorities involved. Oh-and while the cell-phone services may well be unwilling to publicize the utility of their product for drug dealers/pimps/ne’er-do-wells, that doesn’t mean they’re trying to entirely sweep the issue under the rug. The pager company I used to work for (pagers are considerably more useful for these characters, as {the movie Eraser not withstanding} a one-way pager is completely untraceable) had an entire department dedicated to working with law-enforcement agencies to help them track down criminals using the service. They couldn’t legally release any information without a subpoena, of course; but once that subpoena was in hand, these folks would scour the records to get the cops every last scrap of data that might help them track the troublemaker down …
More to the point-the fact that they’ve waived the charge to you doesn’t mean they’ve decided that you had nothing to do with it. Believe me, they were checking you out as well, even after the charge was waived. And you never share information on an investigation with a suspect.
Thanks guys. I figured it wasn’t in the interests of a major company to simply ignore the fact that its services were being used for criminal purposes, but I just hadn’t come across any information which indicated WU was taking a pro-active position in preventing such use.