Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 49 posts

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

#31

Post by RexetBlell »

diogenescynic wrote: post #27
valuearb wrote: post #3

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.

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

#32

Post by slackingoff2017 »

RexetBlell wrote: post #31
diogenescynic wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#33

Post by 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.

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

#34

Post by khedoros1 »

revelation wrote: post #29
khedoros1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#35

Post by chillydawg »

MichaelGG wrote: post #21
fastball wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? What exactly is your solution?

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.

Money laundering a victimless crime? Where do you think that money comes from?

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

#36

Post by amluto »

theWatcher37 wrote: post #12
ginko wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. See…

That is idiotic. The state forcing a business to accept a customer no matter their records?

Other industries have a word for this: "common carrier" or "regulated utility".

Your electric utility can't kick you out just because they don't like you.

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

#37

Post by cannonpr »

cmac2992 wrote: post #16

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 ?

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

#38

Post by ams6110 »

khedoros1 wrote: post #26
jacquesm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#39

Post by belorn »

mjmahone17 wrote: post #11
readams wrote: post #4

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 involv…

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

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

#40

Post by camgunz »

theWatcher37 wrote: post #12
ginko wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. See…

That is idiotic. The state forcing a business to accept a customer no matter their records?

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.

Post reply on HN