Wire transfer scams: How Northeast Ohio victims can file a claim to get their money back

CLEVELAND, Ohio (WOIO) - Have you ever quickly wired money to someone and later found out you’d been scammed?

You may be able to get some or all of the money back if you act fast.

We’ve been covering their stories for years. Now, scam victims have just a few days left to file claims, requesting money back.

The Federal Trade Commission is one of our Cuyahoga County Scam Squad partners. A representative sat down with Hannah Catlett recently, to explain who qualifies for a refund and the steps you can take before August 31st to file a claim.

Those who qualify for their money back likely walked into a grocery store, went to the customer service counter and used Western Union to wire funds not knowing they were in the middle of a scam.

Jon Miller Steiger is Federal Trade Commision’s Director of the East Central region.

The consumers who qualify for reimbursements, he says, lost money in several kinds of scams beginning in the early 2000′s; grandparent scams, lottery scams, advanced fee loan scams and others.

“The money transfer systems like Western Union are obviously very good at getting money from point A to point B,” Steiger said. “The scammers like to use it because sometimes it’s hard to figure out where point B is. In other words, it’s easier for them to hide if they’re using money transfer system.”

A few years ago, the FTC and the DOJ sued Western Union, alleging that the company didn’t do enough to stop scam victims from wiring money to scammers running grandparent, lottery and other scams.

“Western Union knew the scammers were using their system in order to take money from people and Western Union didn’t do anything to stop that,” Steiger said. “They make money every time money gets transferred using their system.”

Western Union agreed to refund $586 million to scam victims who used their company to send money to scammers between 2004, and 2017.

If you think you fell victim in that time frame, you can and should still be carful while filing a claim to get your money back through the FTC.

“You want to make sure you are at the dot gov website. Unfortunately, there are scammers out there who actually will try and take money from people trying to get the money that they already lost,” Steiger said.

As far as the future, 19 Investigates found signs and warning flyers at customer service counters like Steiger said we should.

“[Western Union] need[s] to be doing a better job of protecting and monitoring their system to so that if they do identify scammers, they take appropriate actions, but that was a big part also of our settlement with them,” he said.

The FTC says it will depend on how much each victim filing a claim lost and how many claims are filed when the window closes this week to determine how much each person will receive.

Again, you can file a claim through Wednesday, August 31st. The FTC has posted all the information on how to do that on its website.

If you need to file a report about a scam, you can contact the Cuyahoga County Scam Squad at 216-443-SCAM(7226) or on the Scam Squad website.

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