MoneyGram
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
[edit] Fraud
Criminals from foreign countries such as Nigeria that use schemes such as advance fee fraud, (419) and romance scams to convince a victim to send a payment via telegraphic money transfer services. Both Western Union and Moneygram advises its customers to never send money to someone they have never met in person.
Other commonly used fraud schemes involve perpetrators choosing their targets mostly through online auction sites such as eBay but also simple community based ones, and offer to buy expensive merchandise with a MoneyGram transaction. When they then pay their victim with a stolen credit card or other fraudulent means of payment, MoneyGram first shows the transaction as having happened, which lulls the victim in safety and makes him send the seemingly paid for items.
A few days or weeks later when the sending bank discovers the fraudulent nature of the payment, the transaction will get reversed and the seller loses the transferred money with no means of recourse or a way of getting his merchandise back.
MoneyGram has since released a statement that buyers who offer to pay with their services to unknown sellers should not be trusted [1] Criminals involved in these activities also use its major competitor Western Union.
