> Walmart acts as an agent for multiple money transfer services, including MoneyGram, Ria and Western Union
This is an important distinction. The actual money transfer service is not the issue in this specific case.
FTC Sues Walmart for Facilitating Money Transfer Fraud
61–70 of 185 posts
Re: FTC Sues Walmart for Facilitating Money Transfer Fraud
#62Daughter nearly fell victim to one of these. An auditor over the course of 2 hours convinced her that the store manager was stealing money and that she needed to transfer it back to corporate. Thankfully I was giving her a ride that day. She was in a total panic but wouldn’t tell me what was going on. He had her convinced that if she said anything she was gonna go to jail. I thought they were having her do a night mo…
It would help if people were taught a few things about the IRS when they're kids. First, they never urgently need your money. There are consequences for missing deadlines but meeting them is up to you.
Second, the IRS may call you (an auditor did call me once) but they just tell you that a letter is in the mail. All their correspondence is verifiable by calling the office.
Third, they know your SSN. It's on the 1040. They will not call and ask you for it.
Fourth (applies to all callers, like banks, too), they don't call and ask for your PIN. If they do, find out how reach them from the main number, and never give a PIN to someone you don't know who called you.
Re: FTC Sues Walmart for Facilitating Money Transfer Fraud
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: FTC Sues Walmart for Facilitating Money Transfer Fraud
#64why hasn't the FTC done this with YouTube and crypto livestream scams. Most of the victims are Coinbase users (addresses that start with bc1) and thus Americans. YouTube profits from these scam videos while people lose millions.
Because crypto livestream scammers aren't a US corporation. They may not even be a single entity.
they are hosted by a us corporation. the corporation has been aware of these scams for years and has refused to act beyond occasionally disabling the videos only after the scammers profit and make more videos and hack into more channels. the corporation also profits from these videos.
Re: FTC Sues Walmart for Facilitating Money Transfer Fraud
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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.
Re: FTC Sues Walmart for Facilitating Money Transfer Fraud
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet two commissioners voted "no". Wanna guess who appointed them?
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.
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.
Re: FTC Sues Walmart for Facilitating Money Transfer Fraud
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is churning in this context?
Credit card rewards churning probably. Basically finding cards with either attractive starting offers or ongoing rewards and then generating cash flow through them that is recurring. One example was the mint at one point was selling some coin online with free shipping, after receiving the coins you'd just deposit them into your account for zero loss. It looked like a normal purchase to the CC so you got the full poin…
> One example was the mint at one point was selling some coin online with free shipping, after receiving the coins you'd just deposit them into your account for zero loss. It looked like a normal purchase to the CC so you got the full points for it.
Presumably the mint was eating the credit card fees on this, so effectively it was a transfer of money from the government to the churner, with the credit card company keeping some amount on the way.
Re: FTC Sues Walmart for Facilitating Money Transfer Fraud
#68Related to this, I do not understand how Green Dot is still in business. I worked for a fintech, and literally every single attempted transaction we got from a Green Dot card was fraud. We wrote special logic in the code that specifically required all Green Dot transactions to get a manual review - I can't remember if we switched this to just outright reject, because I'm not exaggerating when I say we never got a val…
I used to work for a utility company. Almost every fraud included walking into a Duane reed and filling a green dot card. Every time I see one I just think of all those poor people. Once as a contractor in the early 2000s I did a few months at tracfone. While not scamming people directly they definitely knew a lot of their business was people needing phones for shady stuff.
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Re: FTC Sues Walmart for Facilitating Money Transfer Fraud
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet two commissioners voted "no". Wanna guess who appointed them?
Should everything be driven down to partisan politics? There are tons of reasons why Walmart would not want its employees to be judge and jury in identifying fraud and some of the others would have felt that is the right approach.
It doesn't even have to be partisan. Donald Trump could just like fraud.
For example, consider the non-university Trump University, which was shut down and which Trump paid $25m to settle the lawsuits over: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University
He in fact has a long history of stiffing contractors, mistreating workers, tax fraud, and other dodgy dealings: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/donald-...
Given that, it seems almost reasonable that he'd appoint business regulators who were ok with pretty much anything. It would be of a piece with his eagerness to make overseas bribery easier: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/business/economy/trump-br...
Re: FTC Sues Walmart for Facilitating Money Transfer Fraud
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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 b…
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.