What 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.
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? How do you prevent money laundering if you can't reasonably identify your clients?
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:
>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.
That 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.
Yes, 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.
I'm tired of market worship and holding the "rights" of business owners over the rights of everyone else. There are very few true markets, and that's not due to government intervention, it's because many goods and services become essential to modern life, or marketers artificially stratify in an effort to squeeze more money out of upper class consumers. Like what's the lightbulb market like these days? Toothbrushes? Sheets? It's all artificially stratified.
But let's say we allow businesses to not sell lightbulbs to White people. Hey it's their right, right? Then let's say that in practically all regions the majority of retailers would assert this right, making it pretty hard for Whites to buy lights ;). In what way is that good for society? What healthy, just society would allow that?
Libertarian ideas like this are all fatally reductive, and they fail entirely when evaluated on their effects on anyone who isn't the majority. Not everyone starts with the same advantages. Not everyone experiences the same setbacks and barriers throughout their lives. Unless we make policies to specifically correct these inequalities, we entrench them. Oh and hey look, that's exactly what we have in the US. It's not a coincidence.
Preventing 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.
It'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.
And 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.
I 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.
The 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.
Remittances 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.
Things 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.
The 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.
That 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.
My word choice of 'they' wasn't very clear but Western Union would have some access. However internet most likely isn't broadly available for those in poverty, so the recipient most likely doesn't have it. At least not reliably. Imagine having a currency you can't even use. Not very helpful. And then there's still the education part of learning how to use Bitcoin, securing your Bitcoins, and getting that currency accepted by others.
Sure: 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.
I 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.
Right, 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.
>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.
On 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.
Interesting 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.
Western 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.
I 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?
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[ 94.3 ms ] story [ 1576 ms ] threadWhat exactly is your solution?
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_accoun...
It's no different from access to water, housing, electricity, information, ..
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
We have the same law in France and the EU recently passed a similar directive.
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.
Your electric utility can't kick you out just because they don't like you.
But let's say we allow businesses to not sell lightbulbs to White people. Hey it's their right, right? Then let's say that in practically all regions the majority of retailers would assert this right, making it pretty hard for Whites to buy lights ;). In what way is that good for society? What healthy, just society would allow that?
Libertarian ideas like this are all fatally reductive, and they fail entirely when evaluated on their effects on anyone who isn't the majority. Not everyone starts with the same advantages. Not everyone experiences the same setbacks and barriers throughout their lives. Unless we make policies to specifically correct these inequalities, we entrench them. Oh and hey look, that's exactly what we have in the US. It's not a coincidence.
Is this satire?
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.
Not because they 'can't have debit accounts' but simply because there is no banking infrastructure where they live.
Just one more step on the road to legitimizing bitcoins.
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.
Let's be real, you don't need to bribe anyone to pass a fake ID at WU.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India#Remittances
First Data is a tech startup from the 1970s. If it involves payments, they probably have some service offering. They're bigger than PayPal.
Clients can pay easily! Infact Google Adsense pays most international customers via WU without any fees!