[CLOSED] Mang Sweeney's: send money to the Philippines through bitcoin

[MadSweeney]

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Are you looking to send money to the Philippines?

At Mang Sweeney's exchange, you can sell your bitcoins and have the proceeds go to someone else. Put your bitcoins to use as a convenient and cheap way to transfer money to the Philippines.

Remittance
Your beneficiary does not need to know about bitcoin to receive money using this service. Simply sell your bitcoins to me and I will remit the payment in pesos to your designated recipient through a bank or remittance center.

Banks are the cheaper option. The unbanked can go to remittance centers such as M Lhuillier and LBC.

Rates
My buying rate is usually 3% below Bitstamp spot price. But I may adjust it during wild price movements.

You can make a trade request through my Localbitcoins ad. The price shown there is updated automatically every few minutes with the last price of trades made on the Bitstamp exchange's USD market. I recommend using Localbitcoins.com for its up-to-date price quotes and built-in escrow.

How much will your recipient get in total? Fees charged by intermediary transfer services will be deducted from the sale proceeds. So the total amount your recipient will get can be expressed in this formula:

TOTAL TO BE RECEIVED = BTC SOLD - TOTAL FEES

See this for a sample calculation.
 
Privacy
I shall do my best to protect customer data entrusted to me. I also encourage everyone to encrypt and sign their messages. You can copy my public key from here or run 'gpg --recv-keys B798A5A5910D04B9' on the command line. Do not forget to send your public key.

Feedback
Read some feedback of customers further down this thread. Also please post your own comments and feedback.

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[evoorhees]

This is fantastic of course, but how will you market it? 

[MadSweeney]

This will be a modest venture for now. So I've started by contacting people who have expressed interest in this service in the forum. I'll also post on social media sites and local forums. Later, I should talk to my Filipino friends and relatives who work abroad and are new to bitcoin. From there I hope the service spreads by word-of-mouth.

[cbeast]

I have friends in CDO and Zamboanga that I will be introducing to Bitcoin soon. They will be making private loans in PHP and offering their clients to have overseas family and friends send Bitcoin much cheaper and more convenient than money remittance services. They will also use their operating capital to exchange Bitcoin locally. I am told that private lenders are much less regulated than pawn shops.

I am trying to find out if they are familiar with Hawala in Zambo and Sulu.

[spreaders]

Do you have a site yet, or code for the exchange? If not Intersango has open source code for an exchange on github.

[MadSweeney]

I won't be putting up an exchange site like intersango just yet. Philippine demand today, or even in the next few years, for bitcoins is so small for that. Operating as a p2p exchange, I believe, is a good idea. But I would have to automate processes and scale on demand. So I might make a Sinatra app next if things get more exciting.

[sunnankar]

Do you have a site yet, or code for the exchange? If not Intersango has open source code for an exchange on github.

Why not list on LocalBitcoins.com?

I know quite a few of us probably have virtual assistants over there and it would be great to be able to pay them via BTC instead of Xoom, WU or Paypal due to the fees.

[MadSweeney]

localbitcoins.com is down right now. But I'm probably the first to post an ad there in my locality.

[MadSweeney]

I have friends in CDO and Zamboanga that I will be introducing to Bitcoin soon. They will be making private loans in PHP and offering their clients to have overseas family and friends send Bitcoin much cheaper and more convenient than money remittance services.

I'm looking forward to networking with your friends. With the rising price of bitcoin lately, I would rather be more inclined to make a 0% loan from senbonzakura ;-)

[xxaudioxx]

Very good service fellow kababayan..

[Bimmerhead]

Great to see you're doing this, MS.

Perhaps advertising on this Filipino-Canadian forum might generate some business for you: http://www.filipino.ca/forum/category-view.asp

[MadSweeney]

Thanks for the link, Blimmerhead. Will keep that forum in mind.

[MadSweeney]

Next week, I'll be doing a pilot transaction with someone new to bitcoin. Let's see if this bitcoin thingamajig is what it's cracked up to be for remittances.

[MaxSan]

Ok im interested in this. What rates are involved?

[MadSweeney]

Rates

Negotiable rates start at mtgoxUSD last price converted to PH Peso as returned by google.com.

You can also check the up-to-the-minute rate here. Note the "10 btc" is just a placeholder. This is the market price at 1:1 (no % markup). No additional fees from my end, but you pay the bank fees if any.

[MadSweeney]

Updated the OP with details on rates and email address.

[bitdragon]

Thanks for the PM about this.
Can you detail the minimum account information needed to deposit Pesos to an account?
I owe at least $150 to someone there and am willing to give this a try soon.

[MadSweeney]

Can you detail the minimum account information needed to deposit Pesos to an account?

1. Name of bank
2. Account name
3. Account number

[yesbtc]

I wonder what are the risks involved?
Not that I have any reason not to trust MadSweeney but aside from the obvious that you risk losing your btc - isn't there also a risk associated with giving someone else your account number?
Alternatives like Mlhuiller's kwarta padala has crazy rates though...

[MadSweeney]

I wonder what are the risks involved?
Not that I have any reason not to trust MadSweeney but aside from the obvious that you risk losing your btc - isn't there also a risk associated with giving someone else your account number?
Alternatives like Mlhuiller's kwarta padala has crazy rates though...

If you're worried about transactions being snooped on or spoofed there are enough indications that my service is GPG-ready. If you haven't used GnuPG before to encrypt and sign text or files, I'm willing to help you learn how to use it.

If you're worried about how I secure my wallet, I use Electrum offline wallet on a Linux host for Mang Sweeney's transactions.

If you're worried about what I will do with bank account numbers, I'll admit to my ignorance of the nefarious ways such information can be of use to anybody. I don't know, for instance, how to take money out of someone's bank account using the account number and account name only.

Will I give account information to someone else? I can only assure you that I won't volunteer to give it to anyone nor will I disclose it if she asks nicely.

Your questions make me think that maybe I should destroy all such information after the completion of transaction. That way I wouldn't even be forced to give them up. (But it might be problematic if a dispute arises and I have no records.)

If I were subject to AML regulations, as the established remittance shops have to be, I couldn't do that for KYC compliance. Discussions of whether I should subject myself to such regulations or not, however, are for another thread.

If you're worried that I'll scam you, then keep on being observant and asking questions. And I'll do my best not to get annoyed.