Many scammers are using Western Union and similar types of electronic transfer services to carry out their crimes against innocent victims, but why? What is it about these services that make it so beneficial for those with criminal intentions?
Simply stated, scammers use Western Union because there is a lack of checks and balances in the money wiring business as a whole. It is extremely easy for a crime to be carried out using a wire transfer, for the following reasons.

Western Union Scams Are Speedy

When you send a wire transfer, the money is picked up on the other end extremely fast. Unless the victim intentionally creates a diversion that will slow down the process such as setting up a security question that the scammer will not know offhand, the money is processed and made available on the other end in a very short period of time.
Even when the victim is an American or Canadian sending large amounts of money to a foreign country, it is almost always already picked up by the time the victim realizes they have been scammed.

Identification Is Hard To Track With Western Union

Most scammers have access to various fake IDs and they use them to pick up Western Union transfers under fictitious names. This makes it almost impossible for a victim to track them down and prove that they carried out the crime, since the victim never learns their real name.

These fake IDs are extremely hard to detect from real forms of ID, so there is little employees of the wire transfer service can do about this occurrence. If one fake name is found out, the scammer simply purchases another ID in another name to continue their crimes. Often, one scammer will have various IDs that they use for different victims simultaneously.

Lack of Recourse

Once the scammer receives the money at their local Western Union location, they are successful. Eventually, the victim will realize what has occurred but it will be too late. There is absolutely nothing they can do to prove the crime occurred or who was on the other end of it. In some cases, criminal investigations into the fake names used to send the money turn up to be stolen identities from yet another victim that knew nothing of the crime.

Western Union does not guarantee any of their transactions nor do they return money that was scammed from a victim. They simply warn their customers to never send money to someone they do not personally know.
This is actually good advice that can prevent a lot of the fraudulent transactions that go through Western Union every day, but some scams will still occur. For instance, victims of romance crimes often feel they do know their scammers. They feel they know them on a very intimate level and this suggestion from Western Union does not apply to them.
Obviously, fast wire transfers are the easiest and most convenient method for scammers to receive cash from their victims and go on undetected and completely unidentifiable.

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