“1M Syrian customers, do you think they will ever forget Western Union?” | Hacker News Reader

“1M Syrian customers, do you think they will ever forget Western Union?”

bloomberg.com

68 pointsvwcx46 comments

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.

kind of curious, how did you find your volunteering experience in Lesvos ?

Rewarding in ways, but mostly just overwhelming and depressing. Seeing it IRL really puts things in perspective.

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.

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.

If they don't have internet, how does Western Union receive the message for the money transfer?

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.

>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.

This is true. Usually all you need is the name of the recipient and the exact amount and they'll accept your signature.

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.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India#Remittances

Where is "here"?

Dont 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!

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?

Western Union is really good as a reliable indicator that a transaction is a scam.

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.

Reminds me how from a spam filter perspective, anything written in a non-native language is spam.

I've used WU many times to get money to people in remote places. None of those transactions were scams.

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.

...and they are an "unreliable subset of the population" because...???

Reply on news.ycombinator.com