howard, I doubt it’s fraud. If it were fraudulent the programs undoubtedly would have caught on a long time ago.
lagunacat, it could be fei ch’ien, but despite what you might have read about this informal remittance of money, it has been practiced for many centuries not just in China, but throughout Asia and Africa and the Middle East (using different names such as hawala, for example) and can probably be considered as the forerunner of what we know today as Western Union or MoneyGram.