If you’ve been a long time customer of Western Union. Chances are you faced some sort of sending or receiving limitations from the company at some point of time.
Western Union deals in the financial industry. Which means they have a lot of strict regulatory regulations to maintain in order to operate smoothly in the countries they work in.
To maintain these regulations Western Union does not bother blocking customers from using its services.
Can Western Union Block You From Receiving Money?
Banned From Western Union?
Learn how to get unbanned from Western Union in a week. Read this article to start sending/receiving money again.
Yes, Western Union can definitely block you from receiving money. They have already done that with a lot of customers. Which means you would not be able to receive funds from anyone using Western Union.
Why Does Western Union Block People From Receiving Money?
If you call Western Union’s customer support in hopes of getting a reason why you did wrong that will lead to your ban. You would be disappointed.
Western Union employees would never give out the exact reason for the ban, because they are not authorized to pass this information to the customer.
After working for almost an year at the customer support team for Western Union. Here are the 3 reasons I’m able to come up with that lead to customers getting banned from receiving funds.
#1 Your Name Matches a Fraudster
If you were not living under a rock. You should have definitely heard about innocent people getting scammed using Western Union. Western Union scams have reached a gruesome level that now Western Union had to create a whole department to tackle scams involving Western Union.
They gather all the data they have on scammers and try to predict if anything scammy is about to happen. So if your receiver details match one of these scammers. Your transfer could get on hold for further clarification.
In these scenarios, Western Union does not blindly ban you from using the services. However, they would ask you for further identification such as a driver’s license to tell the difference between scammers and you.
If you have managed to provide the documentation, you should be cleared to receive the funds.
#2 You Have Exceeded AMOUNT of Receiving Limit
At Western Union both the receivers and senders are subject to transfer limits. The limits do not apply on a monthly basis, but to the last 30 days of transfers.
The maximum amount of money you can receive depends on the country, payment method and transfer type, and it can vary.
#3 You Have Exceeded the NUMBER of Transfer Receiving Limit
The limits don’t just apply on the amount of transfers, but how many transfers you have received in the last 30 days. According to my experience, Western Union only allows around 4-7 transfers in the last 30 days.
If you have already received this many transfers irrespective of the Amount limit. You would still face restrictions on the money transfers.
Banned From Western Union?
Learn how to get unbanned from Western Union in a week. Read this article to start sending/receiving money again.
How Long Does Western Union Block You from Receiving Money?
It depends. If Western Union believes you’re involved in fraud. They would keep you banned for life.
Any bans that have been put for exceeding your transfer limits should be lifted after the limits resets itself.
How to Request to Remove Ban of your Western Union Account
If Western Union banned you for suspicious activity, chances are they will keep you blocked until you request a re-evaluation for this ban.
This re-evaluation gives your account another chance to be unbanned. You can check the complete steps to apply for a re-evaluation request over here.
How to Check if You Have Been Blocked from Receiving Money?
If you have already been blocked. No future transactions would even process with your name as the receiver. This message should show up to the sender while he’s making the transfer. It doesn’t matter if he’s on the app, the website or the store.
If it is your first being blocked, the transfer can go into processing. But you would have trouble picking it up at the store. Most likely, the agent at the store would give you an error code starting with the letter R followed by 4 digits.
You would then be asked to call customer support with the code. Where you would ultimately be told that you are blocked from receiving funds, and the only way to review the decision is to send an email to gcr@westernunion.com .
