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Comment by rmatt2000 | Hacker News Reader

rmatt2000

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.

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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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

There are many ways to handle suspected fraud. One completely reasonable approach would be to talk to customers about scams if fraud is suspected. You can still leave it up to the customer to decide to go through with the transaction.

Other approaches exist too. But doing absolutely nothing and quietly proceeding with the transaction is just hostile to your most vulnerable customers.

Funny, when Walmart’s money is involved, they have no problem having untrained staff harass, profile and intimidate customers suspected of not following store policy.

I feel like you are speaking without knowledge, because it usually take an extraordinary amount of blatant repeat theft for the loss protection team to act against an individual. Solo one-time shoplifters have close to a 100% chance of success without being apprehended.

There’s a well established, well documented pattern of conduct by Walmart that suggests otherwise.

In a town near me, the store generates ~3000 arrests a year, to the point that the town has a police substation on the premises.

Comparing blatant theft of physical property to a possible financial scam, the latter of which the company has nowhere near the context required to make a determination on, seems a bit disingenuous, no?

comparing theft of a $5 tshirt or whatever to scams worth thousands of dollars is what seems disingenuous.

most of crime in the world is not petty shoplifting, its financial fraud amd much of it is done under corporate veil

> In a town near me, the store generates ~3000 arrests a year

Of first time shoplifters? I find this incredible, as when I worked Walmart (admittedly eons ago) you had to be a very well known repeat offender to get caught. Everyone else would simply be yelled at to leave at best.

Target (from friends at the time) even had a policy to simply let thieves do their thing and document until they hit the threshold for a felony - at which time they'd take action.

Just that repeat offender list ended up with an arrest maybe every other day or so though.

I find it amazing society has changed that much in such a relatively short time. I know every store/location is different but this stat definitely blew my mine.

Depends on the location/state of the store

These are valid concerns. But both options are extremes. There's a lot of middle ground between don't complete any suspected fraud transactions and always complete suspected fraud transactions.

Most retailers also tell their employees to let theifs get away rather than physically confront them. Doesn't mean they "don't care if there's" theft. Of course they care! They just want the relevant authorities to deal with it instead of putting their employees in potentially dangerous situations.

The article doesn't say whether the policy instructed employees to report the suspected fraud afterwards.

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.

Would you prefer their books have to be open to the government for inspection to look for the fraud?

That's the current reality.

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.

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

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.

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/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.

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.

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.

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