For years, according to the complaint, it was Walmart’s stated policy for its employees to issue payouts even in the case of a suspicious money transfer, making it easy for scammers to retrieve fraud proceeds at a Walmart location. The complaint cites a Walmart reference guide for employees that stated: “If you suspect fraud, complete the transaction.”
I would expect cashiers suspecting fraud would have a high and probably discriminatory false positive rate. I wouldn't be surprised if it also sucked at detecting any actual fraud
I'd bet many cases were obvious. How many people told the employees they were paying IRS fees? Or that they had a long lost relative who contacted them? Many of these scams aren't sophisticated and the people falling for them are gullible. It's not hard to imagine that an employee with a bit more sense than the customer could have simply been told what's happening and realized it's probably illegitimate.
I was chatting with an elderly man in front of me in line at the post office years ago. He was complaining that he had already paid so many fees but was really close to collecting his winnings from the Australian lottery (we were in the US). And according to him, he never even entered the lottery. I told him that this was a common scam and that they were simply stealing his money and to not send them anymore.
He said, no, he knew it was real because they gave him the phone number for a bank and he called and the man on the other end confirmed it was real.
I implored him not to send any more money, but he continued to take out a postal money order for a few hundred dollars.
I told the cashier that he was being scammed after he left and they just said "ya, but what can you do?"
My father, who is in his 70s, and mentally very sharp, although a little hard of hearing, was trying to organize a wire transfer from Australia to me in the US for around $25K.
He had a hell of a time doing it, not even as a matter of international wire logistics, but convincing the bank staff to "allow" him to do so because they were "concerned he was being scammed".
On one hand I appreciated their concern, but as he told them, "Do you see my (very very uncommon) family name? See his? It's my son." "Well, have you spoken to your son? Did he ask you to send him money on Facebook?" "No, WE offered to send him a gift towards downpayment of a house." "How do you know this is his bank account details?" "Because I asked him for them and he gave them to me?"
Frustrating, but I think a necessary thing considering how common older people are scammed. The name you are wiring to doesn't necessarily mean anything. And it is a very common scam for people to impersonate overseas family members and ask for money. So good on them for doing some due diligence. Especially someone who is hard of hearing can be susceptible to this type of scam because it may be more difficult to recognize a loved one's voice over the phone.
Why do you consider that total freedom of an oblivious individual fucking their finances is a good thing for society? As a society we are actually here to help others with our experiences, if the experience of a cashier with multiple fraudulent transactions can help a soul to not be a sucker, why shouldn't they use that power?
Why do you consider "lawful" as the only measure of "good"?
Those what? I feel you aren't really interested in engaging on a discussion here, throwing hot takes and platitudes isn't very conducive to have a conversation...
Well, if one sees a crime being committed against an elderly person, it is kind of an recognized social duty to intercede, though really there seems to be no good practical way of doing so in the case like this.
And some level of stupidity, either natural or appearing with age, qualifies people to lose their right to be stupid, ie. conservatorship. Unfortunately it is a very heavy legal process of a sledgehammer when i think in many cases it should be a surgeon knife.
You see old people losing their life savings—the only money they have to live on—as being better than them having certain very obviously fraudulent financial transactions questioned, and potentially delayed?
Old people (or anyone) being scammed out of their life savings is bad. Full Stop.
What is worse is some random person in line being able to speak up and have someone's bank account effectively frozen. Yes, this story is about Walmart but the real issue is banks here, in my personal direct experience.
This topic is near and dear to me as I have personally seen how the banks do not consider money in your account to be your money - it is their money you can use in a prescribed manner. Step even a little off that reservation and you will find how much power others have over what you thought was your money. It can take months and years to resolve, and you generally have very little to no legal recourse.
Random dude in a line, or a random $18/hr bank/walmart cashier is not an appropriate place to put your fraud detection and denial systems in place. Advising a transaction is fraudulent is A-OK in my book. Having customers sign release forms - cool. Actually denying funds? This is something I, and others, find absolutely morally and ethically repugnant. Your money is yours to do with what you wish, including lighting it on fire. It is not your place to tell me I cannot do that.
Up until the point I do something illegal with my money, no one should have a single iota of say in how I spend, move, or deploy it.
It sounds to me like what you're criticizing is one particular method of addressing the problem, rather than the general idea that we need to address the problem.
It would absolutely be reasonable to continue fighting fraud by recognizing that these things can happen, and taking steps to combat them, without tilting it as far as you have seen in favor of banks essentially confiscating customer funds.
Well, suppose we learnt with 100% certainty that a spesific bank account belongs to dangerous criminals - surely we should not be allowing money transfers to that account - either you are beinflg scammed, or you are financing crime on purpose.
I sympathise with your position, but you cant have people awndong money to know drug dealera and terrorists and go "oh well, its their money" either
the additional angle to consoder is that we have duty of care to vupnerable individuals - elderly pwople and children.. like if a peraon with a degree in finance is buying crypto, no questions. but if someone in their 80s is investing in crypto becauae their neighbour tols them to, thats suspicious
i am writing this as someoje who currently can't send koney to family because the whole country has been sanctioned, so,
I see a the risk of some very cynical younger people who will discover that (while the loving bonds of family are all very well) they can make money by seizing their parents assets. There are some real monsters out there, especially once there is money on the line. Family courts go through horror cases on a daily basis. That risk of elder abuse is worse than scammers and much more pressing.
In this story the person in question did have their transaction questioned. Having it delayed is meaningless, there is no reason to believe a delay would have made them change their mind. This is a question of whether it is their money, the banks money or someone else's money and the correct answer is it belongs to the gentleman who is getting scammed. People will suffer less on average if we let them spend their own money as a matter of policy.
"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." (J.S. Mill).
I think this is a good example of the limitations of this principle. It precludes social cohesion and mutual responsibility.
Walmart cashiers by and large are not sophisticated either. I mean that sounds harsh but these are not people walking in with a lot of financial savvy. Without training and reminders I would not think they would be any more likely to identify these scams than the victims are.
Maybe Walmart should be expected to employ people in these roles who are paid and trained well enough to be able to pass a test like "can you spot the most obvious scam that has ever scammed, at least once in a while?"
Perhaps, as you suggest, Wal-Mart should hire high-paid, well-trained executives from PayPal, Zelle, CashApp, Venmo or other services. God knows there's never been fraudulent transactions or scams on those platforms.
You obviously have a beef with Wal-Mart, writing essentially the same comment 4 times and seemingly ignoring the fact that virtually every supermarket and check-casher in the country has a similar employee running the Western Union desk.
Impeccable? You've made up your mind based solely on the accusation (which 2 of the 5 Commissioners voted against). I prefer waiting until the defense gets its say.
Yes, you're right. There's no middle ground between "3 hour morning training on using the Western Union console" and "fintech antifraud executive", none at all.
I am a minority, but every time a minority comes in, i tell them take their business elsewhere. After 30 years, you just know by how they walk. If some woke person analyzed this, they will definitely be correct.
The alternative is many people's experience with a denial of service by a faceless fintech or paypal when they actually need it.
Since Walmart was the readily available trading depot, manual reviews would waste too much time. They couldn't tell the difference between someone churning for credit card signup bonuses, someone that was actually the victim of a bounced check scam and didn't know it yet as they were sending a money order for the difference as instructed by their scammer, or an actual member of a drug gang intentionally being a money mule from a drug transaction.
This is preferable. I wouldn't trust a cashier to detect fraud in any trustworthy rate. That wording in the guideline is important. Suspicion of fraud is not fraud. Acting upon employee suspicion would just skyrocket costumer outbursts and complaints.
> If the answer is yes to any of those, decline the transfer and give them a pamphlet on common scams. This would take care of about 90% of the problem.
Decline the transfer. You would be surprised on the latter though - people have walked their family through the scam, "No, I still think it's probably legit", even gotten police involved, "ma'am, these people online are scamming you", "But what if they're not?"
> In a sprawling, low-rise building abutting pasture land in New Castle, Delaware, HSBC’s anti-money laundering staff review customer transactions and so-called alerts generated when the bank’s monitoring systems spot a suspicious transaction.
> Former employees in the New Castle office describe a febrile boiler-room environment overseen by managers uninterested in investigating transactions with possible links to drug trafficking, terrorist financing, Iran and other countries under U.S. sanctions, and other illegal activities. Instead, they say, the single-minded focus was on clearing out the paperwork as fast as possible.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
looks over at the Visa/Mastercard porn thread full of people lecturing us all about how corporations can't knowingly do business with people/companies breaking the law
I'm not familiar with regulations on credit card organizations, but I would guess their responsibilities are closer to those of banks than Walmart's responsibilities. I spent more than a decade at an investment bank, and it's pretty heavily regulated.
Daughter 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 money drop off by herself which I was pissed about.
She went into a Kroger to the finance counter. Which is when I finally realized what was going on.
The lady at the counter was totally gonna let her send several thousand dollars to some random Green dot account.
So I asked if the lady could go get the store manager real quick.
Older lady walks up and says “oh you’re being scammed” My daughter burst into tears as she finally realizes she had just robbed her own store.
Store manager regaled us with tons of stories of scams people were constantly trying to run on them many of them incredibly elaborate.
If I hadn’t been there good chance she would be arrested.
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.
Not just this, but common red flags that indicate a scam. There are many variations but they all follow the same broad plot lines. Any unexpected request for money should be verified. The more urgent it sounds, the more likely it is fake. If you are traveling, give your kids/parents a code word that you will use in case of an emergency. No legitimate collection agency, business, bail bond company, or government office is going to demand payment in the form of gift cards.
So she still took thousands in cash out the door with her? It sounds like she went right back to work and put it back, but if anyone found out she had taken that money off the property, I doubt she would keep her job. I would recommend not sharing this story with anyone else.
> She could have taken money then gotten cold feet and made up story
Not saying anything about your daughter (don't know her), but there's an easy way to tell: get the phone records and verify the "conversation" took place. It should have lasted longer than 30 seconds.
One simple trick unravels 90% of the "someone else made me do it" clusterfucks.
No, it's generally not illegal to fire the scam victim employee. However, it almost certainly looks awful in the press. My point was that the employer was likely trying to distance themselves from any accusation in that respect. Further, constructive dismissal is an offence into and of itself in many jurisdictions, so that stands alone. It's just difficult to prove and prosecute.
This sounds like a separate, but related novel version of these scams that target Walmart's employee. You might want to report this to the FTC via the contact info in the article so they can be on the lookout for stuff like this in there investigations.
Someone called the daughter (a Walmart employee) on the phone and convinced her they were an "auditor" for Walmart.
They convinced the daughter to take cash (from the register? from the safe?) to another store and almost convinced her send it to a green dot card (some kind of debit card?).
Hi it’s me your irs tax audioter accounter cto manager I need you to buy many Amex gift cards and send me the codes so I can surprise the Ukrainians with them.
You'd be surprised how targeted these scams can be.
A friend's mother got an email from her synagogue, with the rabbi's name and everything, asking her to buy some gift cards to surprise some other (named) officials.
The grocery store manager was telling us how scammers have names of all higher ups at her and nearby stores and their schedules. So they know when to call, and what names to mention. All extremely professional sounding over the phone.
except that the scammer was another attendee with a drug problem? before you yell at me, this actually happened to me, contacted via a trusted, long-term social club, and one of the wives (unknown to me) apparently had a full-on painkiller addiction and when it is time, they do anything.. even as far as using the phone list from the trusted social group to arrange for (thinly disguised) payment card purchases "now"
A new secretary at a company I consult for received an email saying she needed to buy gift cards for an employee. Our best guess is scammers look for people posting about their new administrative assistant jobs on LinkedIn, etc....
Many companies leak tons of information on their website; look up the CEO/President's name, find someone on Linked-in that is a new hire, guess their email based on whatever format the company uses (first.last@company, etc) and send a decent looking email or call.
It's pretty darn advanced, and can extend to texts, etc. If you don't know 'how your president talks' you can easily be bamboozled (we cover it in onboarding now, and have identified people they can always go to with questions).
Happens all the times at companies even with mandatory training that specifically mentions scams involving gift cards. Pretty sure they are now using deep fakes with voice. Started seeing messages with “hi this is companyexecutive call me asap at this number. I need gift cards for an event.”.
Ah you must be the same auditor who sms'd me my new amazon account credentials a couple hours ago. Thanks for being so on the ball watching for fraudulent activity.
This week a fast food worker was shot and killed because someone had too much mayo on their burger. You think a company is going to tell ten dollar an hour workers to piss off criminals?
This is the realest comment here. are you really going to ask for the donation like the manager asks to every moaning and complaining person for example? No you're going to take their money and say nothing and move along. Poliicy meeting reality.
Its not criminals buying Walmart vouchers, its grandmas trying to pay their IRS bill while holding phone in one hand being told what to do step by step in thick Indian accent.
It sounds like both sides of the transaction were at Walmart. So in theory they could have intervened on both sides. But intervening on the sender side definitely sounds easier and safer.
Related 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 valid Green Dot transaction.
I sold green dot cards at a retailer. Green dot cards exist for those who get shadow banned from cashing checks and opening bank accounts from ChexSystems. Green Dot Cards charge a monthly fee, activation fee, and fees for certain transactions last I checked. Besides their apparently non existent AML, it seems to be a lucrative niche.
I’ve used green dot cards on a few occasions just to give it some legitimacy. 1) got it as a spot bonus at work 2) buy them with cash to then purchase a vpn service that I use. I won’t go into other precautions I take to remain anonymous online but it’s a start haha
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.
It is inconceivable to ask minimum wage Walmart employees to detect fraud, detect fake IDs, and conduct suspicious activity investigations. It costs much more money to conduct those checks than $1 or so that Walmart charges for its transfers. Walmart will simply stop providing those services, which were used primarily by disadvantaged populations and immigrants.
That's on Walmart. Obviously we don't want to make things harder for already disadvantaged communities, but we simply can't let Walmart off the hook when they specifically tell their employees to complete transactions even when they suspect fraud. There are just too many stories from Walmart employees who KNEW a person was being scammed but they were required to complete the transaction.
They are free to warn the person getting scammed, but it's not their job to decide for a grown adult person what they should do with their money. The elderly and the gullible should have their relatives and social workers looking out for their finances, not Walmart employees.
What's next, fine Walmart for selling junk food because people are getting fat and dying (by the way much more costly problem than scam transfers).
>Obviously we don't want to make things harder for already disadvantaged communities, but we simply can't let Walmart off the hook when they specifically tell their employees to complete transactions even when they suspect fraud.
That's a nice thought. How do you propose we meet the former when the alternatives for preventing the latter would result in increased costs being passed to those consumers?
There is a reason why such kinds of fraud are practically nonexistent in some other countries but are prevalent in the US.
Alas, nearly every problem in the US stems from politics.
A problem which could have been solved easily will keep being a problem for another decade.
Regulators could have solved the problem at its root and make the scams impossible, but no, they would rather shoot the messenger and force money transfer service to do government's job. At the expense of everyone else.
The problem is much complex than that. Coming up regulations and policies for the whole country isn't as simple and easy as it look.
It's just like dealing with many differnt large codebases that has multiple language, is managed by multiple different departments and teams.
The same thing happened in Big Tech. Bugs are usually not fixed until they become a critical issue, not because they can't be, the solution is either too simple and not worth it (allocating resource to it become negative return because it's not aligned with the companies goal or KPI, so any second you spent on it, is like you're doing it in your free time, no one in the company will appreciate the effort) OR it's too complicated and there's no easy way out without some party compromising.
In the end, a bug or something that could actually improve UX, is simply dismissed because how you felt is less important than the data and figures.
Many kinds of fraud mentioned in this post and the original article hinge on the fact that fraudsters can easily withdraw the money from the destination account.
Just close this loophole and a bunch of fraud schemes will go obsolete.
Require physical presence in the bank with machine readable biometrics passport for account opening (just like everywhere else) and boom, half the fraud schemes are gone.
US forced all other countries in this world to require physical presence in the bank (great initiative, btw), but made an exception to themselves.
Require machine-readable passport with biometrics for large cash withdrawals (just like everywhere else).
Create a centralized, machine-readable, PKI-enabled proper identification infrastructure (just like everywhere else) instead of painted plastic which they call driver licenses, create a centralized, unified, secure registry of all people instead of using SSN and boom, the rest of fraud schemes become useless.
Just start with this, easy to implement, simple solutions which will pay for themselves in a few years. No need to invent a bicycle, numerous countries went this way long time ago, there are no unknowns on this path.
Swiss ID card made by Thales is quite difficult to forge. IDs of foreigners are biometric. There is a centralized registry against which ID cards can be verified.
I wish we had all that here in the US.
There is a good balance between security, efficiency and privacy in Switzerland. US should emulate CH.
> Require physical presence in the bank with machine readable biometrics passport for account opening (just like everywhere else)
The problem with that in the US is that the US - unlike almost every other developed nation - doesn't have a requirement for people to possess a government issued ID card or a passport. The reasons for this are multiple: right-wing/"sovereign citizen"-type of people afraid of the government building databases or whatever, people exploiting illegal immigrants (aka well-connected farmers and meatpackers) who would not be able to pay their staff, and people on the left who see it as yet another expense to be paid by poor people.
They should just get rid of gift cards all together.
I couldn't think of a worse gift than a gift card. It has same level of thoughtlessness as gifting someone a bunch of cash, but brings them less utility because they're constrained to spending it at a specific store unless they on-sell the card at a haircut from the face value.
> What regulations would have solved this problem?
For one, crack down on caller ID fraud so people from scam call centers in India can't impersonate the IRS or whomever else. Next, require phone carriers to combat robo-dialers in general, even with correct numbers these are a plague.
Government could provide a national photo ID and develop standards for its secure use as part of regulating interstate commerce. As it stands the US has know your customer laws but allows businesses to initiate lines of credit to people without actual proof of identity.
It sort of is in the complaint. It sounds like the FTC imposed requirements on MoneyGram separately years ago, and MoneyGram tried but failed to impose those obligations on Walmart's retail locations. (It also seems that Walmart is itself a registered MSB/transmitter.)
why 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.
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.
Walmart Money Center has been a pretty large component of "manufactured spending" which is not the same thing as churning but churning is often used as an umbrella term for all point earning hacks activities.
Yeah, it would be hard for churning/MS to exist without Walmart. You can buy Visa/MC gift cards with a credit card, turn them into money orders at Walmart (via running them as "debit"), and deposit those into most banks at a ~1% total loss.
These days, I think Walmart is not the easiest route to liquidate gift cards though. They used to allow some silly things like combining many gift cards to buy one money order, but are at least supposed to restrict it now.
Sounds like you are alluding to wire fraud, but you would be doing something wrong if you are defrauding anyone. You are just sending money to yourself, via a fairly high-surveillance method (Walmart will check your ID, you have to deposit it into a real bank account, etc).
You can definitely still do it. I would say it is a bit less popular now though as the pandemic slowed travel, and credit card issuers have gotten used to churning and managing breakage/risks.
Chase still offers big incentives on office supply stores, so that's probably the main driver of MS right now aside from sign-up bonuses. Staples quite frequently offers $0 fees on their gift cards to encourage this.
You definitely can. I used to say "maybe not in the sfbay area" where all of the opportunities have been mined, but, no, there are still opportunities for MS even there. Outside of sfbay the sky's the limit.
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 points for it.
> 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.
The mint actually wanted to get rid of the dollar coins that they were accumulating storage fees on. Congress decided to make the mint mint way too many dollar coins (and prohibited it from advertising) and nobody wanted them. Once people ordered and deposited them they'd make their way to the Federal Reserve and were no longer the mint's problem.
So yes, a transfer of money from the government to the purchaser, but with a lot more steps.
Don't forget the free shipping. The USPS probably got paid by the mint.
> for many years, consumers have reported tens of millions of dollars annually in fraud-induced money transfers processed by Walmart employees. [...] Walmart is well aware that telemarketing and other mass marketing frauds, such as “grandparent” scams, lottery scams, and government agent impersonator scams, induce people to use Walmart’s money transfer services to send money to domestic and international fraud rings.
Sounds like the typical "Hello, this is the IRS calling" or "We will shut off your electricity soon" telemarketing scams; they tell the victim to send money to them (the scammers) using Walmart's services.
Wow!