WU without ID possible?

How is it possible that the Scammer can collect the money almost anywhere in the World without showing his ID. Ive always thought that WU demands ID to be shown. Let us assume that we speak about normal transfer and not a one where password is set. In most countries password transfers are possible only if you can show that your ID is stolen.

[AlanJones]

The details that the victim provides to them will be sufficient for them to redirect the transfer to another country and in a lot of countries (particularly those where scammers operate from), the WU staff (who are not actually employed by WU) are happy to pay out without seeing ID if it is made worth their while.

This makes me wonder why WU cooperates with agents that help to commit a fraud.

I'm not usually a defender of financial institutions Laura but any Western company has to operate within the environment of any country where it does business and unfortunately, if corruption is rife there, it's almost impossible to do anything about it, especially where the workers and businesses aren't directly employed by Western Union.

In the UK recently there was a fuss when a major UK bank was going to sever connections it had with Somali institutions that enabled cheap money transfers, due to concerns over money laundering and funding terrorism. It was stated that this would block people sending money back home to relatives where this money was often the only income they had, and the payment system continues. The fact is that most money laundering and terrorist funding goes through standard banking channels so it's difficult to take action against a system that will only affect the poor.

It's a conundrum, and there is no easy solution. I've seen many alternatives to WU set up and they're particularly popular in Africa, but most of them are little more than scams themselves.

I think in many instances wu don’t have much direct competition. Also are we to assume the WU agency on the receiver end is trustworthy? Many of them are small, independent local shops also set up to act as a WU agent, who might know the local scammers and could be bribed. Cleaning all of that up might be very costly for WU if it meant losing lots of their international outlets. Unfortunate to say, the forums are littered with reports of scammers not showing identification