In January of this year, Western Union reached a $586 million settlement with the FTC to refund some of the money people lost to scams between January 2004 and January 2017, and to create a functional fraud prevention program.
Consumers who can prove they were a victim of a scam that involved wiring money through Western Union between those dates, and who can back up their claims with documentation, may be able to get some money back. Not all of it, but some, which is better than none. The refunds will be handled through the Department of Justice, once they have the money from Western Union. It may take a year or so to verify and pay out claims after that.
So here’s your preemptive scam warning: don’t fall for the inevitable scams based on this settlement. At some point, somebody is going to start attempting to trick people into sending money in advance to claim their share of the settlement.
There will be a claims process through the DOJ. There will not be any prepayments made on your part, you will not be able to “speed up the process” by sending money, and the DOJ or FTC won’t ask you to purchase any gift cards (the preferred method of fraudulent payment these days, now that Western Union has taken enough of a hit to actually start paying attention to the problem). Nobody will contact you out of the blue by phone, email, or any other channel (I predict well-organized scammers who kept their victims’ contact information going after the people they already tricked once). You will submit a claim through the DOJ, wait a long time, and hope for the best.
In the meantime, if you were a victim of a scam that involved Western Union, keep any documentation you have from the incident. How much you can get back will depend on how much you lost and how many people file a claim, but getting something back is better than the nothing you were left with before.
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