I have not used Western Union or other wire transfer methods which don't use
a bank as intermediary. I, however, use the term 'wire transfer' to also refer to
a transfer between my bank account and yours.
It requires going to your bank and asking to 'send money' to an account.
When sending money internationally, there is a set of information required. It
is usually: Recipient's Name (also known as Beneficiary's Name), his/her Bank,
Bank Branch, Bank Account Number, and Country. It is helpful to have the
Physical Address of the Bank Branch and of the Beneficiary, but it is not
always necessary. You will likely need the SWIFT code (the international
version of the 'ABA Number' or the 'routing number' as used in the U.S.) of
the foreign bank as well. Many banks will require that to make an
international transfer. Anyone who is in the habit of receiving wire transfers
should be able to provide you with all of this information readily. All of that
information will go into a formatted electronic message to be sent from the
Sender's Bank to the Recipient's Bank called a SWIFT message (when it gets
transferred between two SWIFT members (basically all banks with any kind of
international transfer capability)).
There is sometimes a fee to send money taken by YOUR bank, depending on
the status of your account and its benefits. When you want to send money
from First National Savings Bank of Poughkeepsie to a local bank in Germany,
it is easy. However, your FNSBP will go through an intermediary bank (i.e.
FNSBP will outsource all of its foreign transfers to a major money-center bank
like Citi, JPM, BoNY, BoA) and in many cases, there will be an 'intermediary
bank charge' or 'correspondent bank charge' of $10-20. If your account is
with a major money center bank, in many cases there is no intermediary bank
charge. There is a section in most bank transfer forms where you as sender
can check a box and agree to have intermediary bank fees, if any, taken out of
your account. Checking it does NOT guarantee that additional intermediary
bank fees are not taken out of the amount being transferred because the
SWIFT message has a notation added by that check mark, but not all SWIFT
message-processing-banks' computers parse the notations perfectly.
Once the bank transfer is made, the money is out of your account and in your
counterpart's account. While it is not impossible to get money back if a
transaction goes bad and you cannot agree with the seller, you should expect
it will be impossible. You should only send bank transfers if you are
extremely confident that you are not dealing with a bad seller (who is trying to
defraud you, or who will not treat you right should the item not be as
described). However, please note that Sellers selling across borders have the
same fears of Buyers that Buyers may have of Sellers, which is why they may
insist on a bank transfer (because Paypal is structurally set up to allow Buyers
to defraud Sellers but not vice versa).
Elizabeth is right that postal money orders are an excellent low-cost way of
sending money internationally, and domestically in the U.S. If you send them
Priority Mail, you can track the envelope, and separately you put a hold on the
Money Orders by going back to the P.O. and asking them to do so (though
you have less time than with a personal check). And if well-documented and it
is a US recipient Seller, the USPS may make efforts to get your money back
should the Seller commit fraud. Note that not all countries' postal systems
are linked this way. Canada or Australia to many countries just does not work.
Schipo points out the basic problem. If one does not trust anyone, then one
should use credit card for everything. However, using a money order to pay
internationally is no safer than using a bank/wire transfer. Once it's gone, it's
gone. For international transactions, there is substantially less structural
protection against fraud for a buyer unless he uses a credit card. That is
simply the way it is. For the seller, there is zero protection other than having
the cash.
