Money Transfers

Western Union Co. said Thursday that it was teaming up with cellphone service providers to develop a system that would allow consumers to transfer money from country to country using mobile phones. Western Union has successfully tested cellphone money-transfer services in a number of U.S. cities. It will work with the GSM Assn., an international trade group of cellphone service providers, on commercial and technical issues to enable services to be offered internationally.

To his defenders, Mahmoud Reza Banki is the accomplished son of Iranian American parents, with degrees from UC Berkeley and Princeton and a business acumen that made him the logical person in the family to trust with more than $3 million. "My family is unusually generous to me, certainly beyond what is customary among U.S. families," Banki, 33, told federal authorities after they asked about the hundreds of thousands of dollars dropping into his bank account. Banki said the money came from his cousin Ali in Tehran.

A man pleaded guilty in Salt Lake City to running an illegal money-transferring business that sent nearly $2 million to the Middle East. Kareem Abdalhassin Albasam, 42, allegedly used nine personal accounts at four Utah banks to transfer the money to Arab Bank in Amman, Jordan. His brother later distributed the money in Jordan, Syria and Iraq, authorities said. Albasam faces up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 when he is sentenced March 24.

Western Union will pay $94 million to settle a long-running legal battle with the state of Arizona over whether the company allowed its money transfers to be used to send proceeds from human trafficking and drug smuggling to Mexico, officials announced Thursday. The settlement includes $50 million that will help law enforcement operations in border states fight money laundering. Western Union has also agreed to beef up its internal procedures to stop its wire transfers from being exploited.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to offer money transfers from its 2,760 U.S. stores as it tries to attract shoppers with added services. The world's biggest retailer will offer Viad Corp.'s MoneyGram Payment Systems service between the U.S. and 150 countries by mid-May, the company said. The Bentonville, Ark.-based company has allowed customers of its Mexican stores to receive money transfers for two years.

Lennox and Inglewood post offices are offering Dinero Seguro, a program that allows patrons to wire money to Mexico more easily. The United States Postal Service has made Dinero Seguro, which means "Secure Money," available at 230 post offices in Los Angeles in recent weeks. The service, previously available at a limited number of locations, will be available at more than 400 post offices in the county by the end of summer, spokesman David Mazer said.

The owner of a Hayward pizza parlor was sentenced last week to four months' home detention and ordered to pay a $5,000 fine after pleading guilty to illegally transferring money to people in Afghanistan and Pakistan. From 2002 to 2003, Noor Alocozy, 41, transferred $1 million, some of which may have reached Jonathan "Jack" Idema, a now-imprisoned American mercenary accused of running his own interrogation camp in Afghanistan, said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Citibank, the nation's largest bank, will soon begin a service for Vietnamese-Americans in California to transfer money directly for relatives living in Vietnam or for humanitarian purposes. The program, restricted to transfers of $300 per family every three months, is considered the first such service provided by a major U.S. bank since the end of the Vietnam War. The Citibank program is scheduled for introduction in Southern California next month.

Federal prosecutors have dropped complaints against six Detroit-area men charged with transferring millions of dollars to Yemen, a Justice Department spokesman said. The complaints against the six were dropped because indictments were not expected imminently, but the investigation is continuing into the transfers that investigators believe amounted to $50 million a year, the spokesman said.

Beacon Hill Service Corp., which prosecutors say moved $9 billion through bank accounts at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., was found guilty by a Manhattan jury on four counts of transmitting money without a license. The verdict came after a five-day trial that included testimony about the role of J.P. Morgan in moving the money, some of which was tied to drug trafficking, official corruption and organized crime, according to prosecutors. J.P.

Cash remittances from Mexicans living abroad keep tumbling, with a second-quarter drop of 17.9% compared with the same period last year, officials said Tuesday. Mexico's central bank said remittances for April through June fell to $5.6 billion, continuing a downward trend that has lasted more than a year. The money transfers are off 12% during the first six months of 2009, compared with the first half of 2008. The latest report was no surprise, but it spelled more gloomy news for Mexico's limping economy, which has been hammered by declining oil earnings, a sharp drop in exports and a flu crisis during the spring that put a big dent in tourism.

The Obama administration announced Monday that it would permit unlimited travel to Cuba by Cuban Americans and lift limits on transfers of money to relatives on the Caribbean island while keeping in place many long-standing U.S. trade restrictions. Obama's moves make good on a campaign promise and seek to take advantage of shifting winds in Havana as Raul Castro, who formally took over from his ailing brother Fidel a year ago, adopts limited reforms.

The amount of dollars sent home by Mexicans living abroad jumped 13% in October as a weaker peso gave the greenback more buying power, Mexico's central bank said. Remittances rose to $2.4 billion in October, up from $2.2 billion for October 2007, the Bank of Mexico reported. The peso dropped to record lows in October, briefly trading at 14 to the dollar. A stronger U.S. currency means dollars sent home buy more in Mexico. Through October, total remittances for the year were down 1.9% at $20 billion.

The pitch: "I found your lost dog!" The scam: A phone call from someone who reports finding a beloved pooch is usually cause for celebration. But Western Union warns that it could be a cruel scam. The company has received reports from owners of lost dogs who say they've been called by people identifying themselves as truckers. The dog, a supposed trucker says, was found along a highway. How it works: The driver says there was no time to get the dog home because of a tight delivery schedule.

The U.S. economic downturn and tightened border controls have begun to alter the rhythms of undocumented migrants who used to move back and forth with regularity, which has crimped the flow of money sent home to Mexico, one of the nation's main sources of foreign income. The developments have produced worry and deep uncertainty in towns such as Tejaro, a farming community of 4,200 where pickup trucks bear license plates from Nevada and Minnesota.

Money wiring is going wireless. Remittance giant Western Union Corp. said Tuesday that it was rolling out a service that would enable consumers in the U.S. to send money to relatives in Latin America using their cellular phones. Targeted at Latino immigrants and their families, the service aims to piggyback on the soaring popularity of mobile phones in the developing world by making it more convenient for customers to send and receive money. Global remittances surpassed $300 billion last year.

Two Iraqis have been arrested for allegedly operating an unlicensed money transferring business suspected of sending more than $7 million to Iraq, authorities said. The affidavit on Maitham Abdulla Jaber Al Samar, 39, and his brother Qassim Abdulla Jaber Al Samar, 38, both of Denver, did not specify where the money came from or how it was spent. Maitham Al Samar has a business called Alrafden Transactions, and Qassim Al Samar has a tobacco sales company called Wholly Smokes, authorities said.

SAN FRANCISCO -- An international banking accord, designed to reduce the exorbitant commissions Mexican workers pay on the billions of dollars in remittances that they send home each year, was announced here Tuesday. But the success of the new program will depend on Mexicans overcoming their long-standing distrust of their native country's banking system. On Tuesday, the U.S.

The amount of money sent home by Mexicans abroad rose 1.38% to $18.2 billion between January and September this year compared with the same period a year earlier, the Mexican central bank said Monday. Remittances to Mexico, the top recipient of the money flows in Latin America, are expected to grow as much as 6% this year, compared with a 15% increase to $23 billion in 2006, as tougher U.S. immigration policies make life harder for Mexican migrants in the world's biggest economy.

A Los Angeles woman pleaded guilty to federal charges of operating an unlicensed money transmitter that illegally funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to and from South Korea. Cindy Ahn, 51, owner of Security Trust and Foreign Exchange on Wilshire Boulevard, admitted to transaction transfers of more than $10,000. She also admitted failing to require records verifying the identity of customers, according to the Los Angeles office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.