I don't know if this has been mentioned before in another topic (there are so many pages to go through
), but I've been listening to Dan Cottrell's radioshow on
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/ibc and quite a few of the interviewed victims of scams have told that they found out about the scam through being warned by Western Union itself. It made me think if anyone has tried to contact WU about being more active in warning people about scams.
I visited their pages online, and they do have examples of fraud and a warning against sending money in certain situations, but it's hidden deep within their pages and you have to click around quite a bit to get to the list of possible scams. I checked out Moneygram aswell, they're a little bit better, one click on consumer protection from their main page (USA) goes straight to a list of warnings about possible scams. (Btw their lists lack some of the classic frauds, such as BTA and lovescams).
I've never used any of the two, but how hard can it be for them to set up a warning for people when they want to send money to certain countries online? If somebody for example wants to send money to Nigeria, they should have to go through a general warning about ongoing scams before they can send the money. Just a little bit of coding and voilá!
It can be a little bit harder when trying to reach people who turn up in person to send money, but handing out a brochure or having a poster on the wall and tell people to read through it when they want to send money to a country on a "dangerlist".
I'm not saying it would be the end of all scamming, but making it a bit harder for the scammers to get their hands on our hard earned cash.
And yes, WU and Moneygram do earn their money from us using their services, but just the fact that they try to warn people actively (as testified on Cottrell's show) and through warnings on their online pages (just not "in your face" enough it seems), should tell us that they're trying to get rid of a bad reputation through being associated with fraud.