<i>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><p>Wow!
Daughter nearly fell victim to one of these.
An <i>auditor</i> 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.<p>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.<p>I thought they were having her do a night money drop off by herself which I was pissed about.<p>She went into a Kroger to the finance counter. Which is when I finally realized what was going on.<p>The lady at the counter was totally gonna let her send several thousand dollars to some random Green dot account.<p>So I asked if the lady could go get the store manager real quick.<p>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.<p>Store manager regaled us with tons of stories of scams people were constantly trying to run on them many of them incredibly elaborate.<p>If I hadn’t been there good chance she would be arrested.<p>A painful life lesson.
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?
Related to this, I do not understand <i>how</i> Green Dot is still in business. I worked for a fintech, and literally <i>every single</i> 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 <i>never</i> got a valid Green Dot transaction.
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.
There is a reason why such kinds of fraud are practically nonexistent in some other countries but are prevalent in the US.<p>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.<p>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.
> Walmart acts as an agent for multiple money transfer services, including MoneyGram, Ria and Western Union<p>This is an important distinction. The actual money transfer service is not the issue in this specific case.
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.