MoneyGram

MoneyGram International, Inc. (NYSE: MGI) is a United States-based financial services company, headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It has additional facilities in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, Lakewood, Colorado, and international offices in a number of countries.

MoneyGram International offers products and services through a network of agents and financial institution customers. The Travelers Express Company, Inc., which has been in operation since 1940, acquired MoneyGram Payment Systems, Inc. in June 1998 from American Express. The business was incorporated in December 2003 in connection with the 2004 spin-off from its parent company, Viad Corporation, and is now known as MoneyGram International.

MoneyGram International provides money transfer services, money orders, and bill payment services to consumers. Another segment of MoneyGram International provides financial institutions with payment processing services, primarily of official check outsourcing services and money orders for sale to their customers.

The major corporate competitor of MoneyGram is Western Union, which is considerably larger than MoneyGram.


FRAUD

Criminals use advance fee fraud (419) and romance scams to convince victims to send payments via telegraphic money transfer services. Both Western Union and MoneyGram advise their customers to never send money to someone they have not met in person. However, when an unknown third party has knowledge that the transfer has taken place, they thus a chance to intercept it. In these cases even transfers to friends and family members can carry a risk.

Other commonly used fraud schemes involve perpetrators who choose their targets through online auction sites such as eBay. The perpetrators offer to buy expensive merchandise with a MoneyGram transaction. The scam artist then pays their victim with a stolen credit card or other fraudulent payment instrument, causing MoneyGram to show the transaction as complete. This draws the victim into a false sense of security, causing him or her to send the seemingly paid for items.

A short time later, when the sending bank discovers the fraudulent nature of the payment, the transaction will be reversed and the seller loses the transferred money with no means to reclaim the stolen merchandise.

MoneyGram has since released a statement that buyers who offer to pay with their services to unknown sellers should not be trusted. This problem is not limited to MoneyGram, as many similar financial services companies are used as vehicles to perpetrate these fraud schemes.

Another scam is that the criminal asks the buyer to send money to a friend or relative of the buyer as proof of good faith. The criminal will then send the item and when received, the buyer releases the funds. The problem is, even if the buyer designates a specific pick-up location for the funds (i.e. near the friend or relative), the money can in fact be picked up with fake ID anywhere in the world. In a variation of this scam, the good faith payment is made to a friend or relative to provide 'proof' of funds for an apartment the buyer is trying to rent from the criminal. The criminal will insist that the 'proof' be provided via MoneyGram and not any other method, such as a money order. The funds are then intercepted by the criminal.


References, external links, notes

Western Union: A Message from MoneyGram

MoneyGram International

MoneyGram eMoney Transfer

I want to purchase from a US based company 'Backdrop Warehouse' who accepts online payments in the US via credit card. For international orders submitted online, they request payment via MoneyGram. They have submitted a price in USD for payment but when I went to the MoneyGram agent in South Australia they refused to accept the payment because it was a 'business transaction' and they stated MoneyGram is for personal transactions only and because they are suspicious of fraudulent businesses and the risk of customers losing money.
I intend to phone the company when they open. In the meantime, does anyone have any advice or experience for such transactions.
Phil, Woodcroft, South Australia

NEVER use Moneygram or Western Union for any business transaction--it is almost always a scam!

If they don't have a bank or credit card capacity they are not a business.