Xoom Corporation

Xoom was recommended to my friend Bill as a quick and easy way to transfer emergency funds to relatives in a different country. Since Bill has a little less experience with computer stuff than I do, he asked me to help him get the transfer set up. After talking with a service rep by phone, Bill put together an email with the information requested, including some scanned images of various documents, like his personal ID card, and sent it to Xoom. The following day, Xoom replied with a "Got it; you're good to go!" email, and Bill submitted his transfer request.

Then the fun began. Another Xoom email, a day later, indicated that the transaction had been cancelled because "the required documentation was not received in time." This led to some increasingly irate telephone discussions between Bill and various Xoom service reps until a "manager" was brought to the phone: the manager explained that the document in question was the I.D. of the RECIPIENT of the cash Suppressing the urge to yell "Well, WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME THIS BEFORE?," he agreed to get THAT document as well. He then told me that a close friend of his had been using XOOM for more than a year to transfer money to relatives in that same country, and had never been asked to provide the recipient's ID.

At this point, it occurred to me to look up some reviews of Xoom on SiteJabber and other websites: most of the customer reviews that I looked at were quite negative, and focused on the point that "service is terrible, and these people don't seem to know what they are doing."

One might expect that a company in the money-transfer business would develop standard procedures for sender and recipient, for each country in their network. One might also expect that they would also offer a checklist of the information and documentation required (from both sender and recipient), by country, AT THEIR WEBSITE, rather than providing this information on-the-fly, by phone.

Bill has decided to do his money transfers via Western Union.