
“1M Syrian customers, do you think they will ever forget Western Union?” - vwcx
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-06-16/for-western-union-refugees-and-immigrants-are-the-ultimate-market
======
cmac2992
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.

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

~~~
cmac2992
Rewarding in ways, but mostly just overwhelming and depressing. Seeing it IRL
really puts things in perspective.

------
Animats
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.

------
valuearb
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.

~~~
diogenescynic
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.

~~~
RexetBlell
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.

~~~
diogenescynic
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.

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

~~~
diogenescynic
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.

------
wcummings
>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.

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

------
itissid
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India#Remittances)

~~~
kcanini
Where is "here"?

------
fghafoor
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!

------
arunmib
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?

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

~~~
mjmahone17
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.

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

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

