I’ve never used Western Union myself, but it seems to me its only purpose in life is to sustain Nigerian scammers. (See this thread).
I can think of a bunch of things that would help just off the top of my head:
[ul]
[li]Have an option for, instead of money, you send incarceration. When the person gives the secret question / answer, they get arrested.[/li][li]Require that all people picking up money have their picture taken and ID scanned, which can be retrieved by the sending party for up to X months.[/li][li]Shut down everything[/li][/ul]
I don’t think I could invent a more optimal scamming system if I tried.
Western Union can’t arrest people, and they have no way of knowing if the person coming in to pick up the money is anything more than a patsy (“We’ll pay you $100 to go inside and pick up some money for us”).
The picture and ID is the better idea, but it’s not like you can’t get a fake ID somewhere. Yes, they have your picture, but you’d have to find the perp first.
I would dispute that Western Union has no legitimate purpose.
It’s a money transfer service aimed mainly at poor people. People who need cash immediately, don’t have bank accounts, can’t easily cash a check.
It’s for when your kid runs away from home and is a thousand miles away and needs money for a bus ticket home. It’s for when your daughter’s drunken louse of a husband ran off with all the money and the trailer park is about to turn off electricity to their home. It’s for when your college kid is broke. It’s for when your brother needs bail money for his DUI.
It can also be useful for when someone stole your husband’s wallet (including money, credit cards, and ID) on a business trip.
It is for when you want to send money to your relatives in a third-world country.
There’s a whole economy out there that serves the underclass. Individually, they may not have much money, but collectively there is a lot of money in their hands which businesses want to share. You’ve got buy-here-pay-here used car lots, check cashing stores, payday loan emporiums, off-track betting, liquor stores, fast food joints. (Ever notice how many more fast food places line the streets in poor neighborhoods than wealthy ones?) They serve needs, but at a high price.
Yes, you can certainly argue that these people should join the financial mainstream and manage their money more wisely. But until they do, Western Union is there to serve them.
Why not just have people judged unfit to handle their own finances if they attempt to send money to someone they can’t prove that they know? :rolleyes:
They do a lot. The real issue is consumer education, and Western Union is just one of many conduits by which gullible people can be bilked of their money.
Yes, but the FBI can open a hotmail account and wait for the spam from the Nigerian oil minister(s) to roll in. Then instead of sending money, they send the “arrest him!” secret code. The oil ministers would never know when they went to the Western Union office whether they would be picking up cash or getting arrested.
(I am making no claim that there is any practical way to actually implement such a thing.)
Exactly, which is why I said there would be no practical way to implement such a thing. Heck, even if the scammer was in San Bernardino, are you going to give arrest powers to every little check cashing store with a Western Union terminal?
But the OP posited a situation where a secret code could be sent that would cause the person picking up the money to be arrested. I was playing along with the premise.
Except for (I hope) everyone in this thread, which was my point.
Who says they don’t have to know them? A popular scam recently involved hijacking facebook accounts and convincing their friends that they went on a spontaneous trip but lost their tickets, etc.
I hadn’t really considered their prevalence as a low-income money mover… it just seems like when obvious scams are going on, they’re the middlemen.
I used to have MoneyGram (Western Union’s primary competitor) as a client.
The primary usage of these services is to send money abroad, particularly by migrant workers and other workers who are working away from home. In many (but not all) of these cases, the workers aren’t terribly wealthy, and don’t have a relationship with a traditional bank (many of which offer their own wire-transfer services). In addition, in many countries outside the U.S., there may be a Western Union or MoneyGram office in the recipient’s village, but no bank or other financial company.
For people sending money from the U.S. to abroad, Mexico is the single biggest destination (which should come as no surprise), but there’s also significant traffic going to other Latin American countries, India, China, and Eastern Europe. In any city where you have a significant immigrant population from a particular country, that city will have a fair amount of wire-transfer business going back to that country.
In the U.S., there’s also a fairly big business in “domestic-domestic” transfers (i.e., sending money to someone someplace else in the U.S.); Alley Dweller detailed a lot of the reasons why people would have need for such a service. We used to (half-jokingly) refer to such transfers as the “deadbeat brother-in-law” service.
Your impression is wrong. It is widely used in immigrant and low income communities.
Literally hundreds of millions of poor, rural families in emerging markets live off of remittances sent via Western Union.
This is of course not just related to North America, but global.
[QUOTE]
I can think of a bunch of things that would help just off the top of my head:
[LIST]
[li]Have an option for, instead of money, you send incarceration. When the person gives the secret question / answer, they get arrested.[/li][/QUOTE]
Pray tell how does this work re a private company operating in another country? Hint: not possible, realm of fantasy.
I don’t understand this comment. Law enforcement helps one another out internationally all the time. Admittedly not with entire consistency, and more in some countries than others.
You’ve obviously never dealt with ‘law enforcement’ in Nigeria, mate.
It’s fairly laughable to think the concept of some coding contact and quickly actionable police intervention in this sense would be workable in West Africa. I do lots of business in the area and spend much time in region, I can assure you, the idea is fantastical.
(*: not that I want to suggest everyone is corrupt, etc. Love the area, but even without corruption, speedy action is not going to happen)