Online Money Transfer
Money Transfer Reviews
Looking around for reviews of different money transfer sites tends to turn up a lot of the larger review websites that are available like reviewcentre.com and others.
When you search for MoneyGram Reviews on Google the best result is a money transfer review that only gives MoneyGram a 2.1 out of 5 rating. It shows 32% of users do not recommend the service.
The question is how many of these review sites online can we actually trust to give an accurate record of money transfer reviews and a real indication of how good the service is?
Read the rest of this entry »
MoneyGram Privacy
Having a read through the MoneyGram Online Privacy Statement it’s interesting to see quite how far an MoneyGram need to go to make sure their clients are comfortable with the privacy of their transfers.
Privacy in MoneyGram is quite obviously a big thing as it should be for all online sites who hold users data. This is especially important when you’re transferring money or dealing with people’s credit card or personal bank account details online.
There have been numerous occassions where websites have been hacked and private details exposed. These situations tend to get thrown around in the media a lot and leave some people being very cautious about who they will pass their bank account details or personal credit card numbers to.
The MoneyGram Privacy Policy states this in the opening paragraphs:
Read the rest of this entry »
Money Transfer News on Twitter
Having a look through a service like Twitter can be a great way to understand what the latest new in the money transfer world is. I just completed a “money transfer” news search on Twitter and this is what came up:
Realtime results for money transfer
incomesearch88 US money transfer sites used in Dubai assassination: report: AFPWASHINGTON — US websites that allow employers to t… http://bit.ly/cvEeut
12 minutes ago via twitterfeeddarymfoell Congress should start a “Latin America Money Transfer Tax.” Illegals don’t pay tax, so lets help them pay their fair share. Say 70%
12 minutes ago via Echofon
Send Money Home
Here’s another company that’s showing up under a search for online money transfer.
It’s SendMoneyHome.com which says the following on its site;
If you are living or working overseas or making a foreign purchase, finding the best way to transfer your foreign currency abroad can be a time consuming and costly exercise.
Send Money Home provides visitors with an independent comparison of the services offered by money transfer providers, banks and prepaid money cards for sending money abroad – including fees, exchange rates, speed and method of transfer.
They do have a useful content section however the website is a little confusing and hard to understand exactly what their key selling point is.
Obopay Mobile Money Services
Press Release from Obopay launching a first-of-its-king mobile money service, powered by Nokia and Obopay. The system uses a mobile payments platform to facilitate Customer Convenience and encourage Financial Inclusion.
MUMBAI – Feb. 15, 2010 – Nokia, a global leader in the mobile telecommunications industry, YES BANK, India’s new-age private sector Bank and Obopay India, a wholly owned subsidiary of Obopay, Inc., have launched a Mobile Payment Service which establishes a platform enabling transfer of money using the mobile device in a secure manner. YES BANK, one of the pioneer banks in the Mobile Payments space, has received the regulatory approvals from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), India’s Central Bank to act as the Issuing bank and the custodian of funds under these services. This innovative pre-paid mobile payments service will be initiated as a pilot in Pune, one of the largest metropolitan cities in India. These services will be widely distributed leveraging off the reach of Nokia’s retail channel.
Read the rest of this entry »
Perfect Money Internet Payment System
I’ve just come across Perfect Money which is an online payment system that I haven’t managed to see before.
Here’s the Perfect Money description on what they do;
Perfect Money is a leading financial service allowing the users to make instant payments and to make money transfers securely throughout the Internet opening unique opportunities to Internet users and owners of the Internet businesses. Perfect Money targets to bring the transactions on the Internet to the ideal level!
They advertise that they have the lowest fees on the market however I will need to do some research on this to check out if the claim is true in comparison to all of the other internet payment systems that complete transactions similar to what Perfect Money (perfectmoney.com) do.
On an initial run through their features, it appears that they are a very similar service to PayPal except that they do offer extras like buying gold.
They do have their own Perfect Money API which is interesting. This means there are pre-built options for accepting payments in online stores through their internet payment system.
Western Union Localized Domains
It’s interesting how a company like Western Union is dealing with overseas visitors.
When visiting the Western Union domain (westernunion.com) from a location outside of the US the visitor is redirected to a localized domain name (for instance westernunion.com.au) instead of the US .com website.
This happens quite regularly in other businesses however WU don’t allow the choice to go back to the US facing website, they only allow the visitor to see their local version of the site without any other International options.
Generally if you’re from another location and are travelling this would be a particularly annoying experience as you’re not going to see the version of the website that you’re used to, you’d only be able to see the money transfer services they have available for the country that you’re visiting their site from at the moment.
Hopefully they update this at some point and allow non-US visitors to get to westernunion.com as well.
Transferring your money into gold
I’ve just seen an advertisement suggesting to go to XForex.com as a way for transferring your money into gold due to the unstable price of other investments that are available.
The site is purely an online forex trading site so it’s interesting to see that they’re promoting the purchase of gold directly. When you go to their homepage, there isn’t anything mentioned about gold transfers neither is there anything reassuring you that they are in fact a gold trader.
If you do a search for buying gold online you end up with bullionvault.com and kitco.com as the first two results as they’re companies where you can buy gold directly.
Generally, if you’re interested in transferring your money into gold you may be better off just purchasing it directly.
Converting Money Online
When you’re looking to convert money online, there’s a good chance you’re either searching for ways to convert money from one currency to another between different bank accounts or you’re generally just looking for a currency converter online.
Whichever it is that you’re trying to achieve, there are reasonably simple options available.
For your first option where you actually have some money in an account somewhere and you’d like it to be converted to another currency in another account somewhere else in the world, you might want to use a service like Currency Online. A company like this has been set up specifically to help you achieve this task, that’s their main focus and they do it well.
If you’re only after the second option, trying to find out what converting money online would cost you and how much money you would end up with if you did do it then there are many different conversion tools available including the above currency conversion tool as well as others from people like MoneyGram, Western Union and many more.
Whichever option you’re looking for, just remember that there are different quote rates based on whether or not you’re converting money online between countries or just within your own country as well as many other factors that can change the conversion rate.
Moneygram Questions
After having a further look around for more information to add to our Moneygram Review it seems there are quite a few situations where people have asked if the Moneygram order they have completed is legitimate or not.
Here are some examples;
I have received two Money Gram Money Orders the first in the amount of $500.00 with a routing number of 091900533 & indicating payable thru Wells Fargo Bank, South Central, N.A. Anchorage, Alaska and could have been purchased at Raley’s Bel Air Nob Hill Food Source. It also shows Issue/Drawer, Money Gram Payment Systems, Inc.
The other Money Gram Money Order is in the amount of $300.00 and shows the same routing number and both were purchased on 8/25/2009, from BlurtIt.
The answer that came back was;
I got three from scammers. This is an old trick. They use Craigslist to buy things with fake Money Orders and then ask for the “overpayment” to be wired back to them. Since it takes weeks for your bank to find out the check is phony, the crook (based in Africa) has your real $$$ which you wired to him.
So, the questions appear to be legitimate issues, be careful that you know where the money is coming from and that you know exactly what it is for before handing over any detailed information.