67flaggedsometransactionsonaccounts
owned by Venezuelans as suspicious,
triggering the cutoffs, says Richard
Crone, head of payments consultancy
Crone Consulting LLC.
As a precaution, many Venezuelans
now limit their Zelle use. The wealthy
are following the lead of friends and fam-
ily stateside and turning to Venmo and
PayPal. The market also has attracted
some lesser-known names in the digi-
tal payments arena. Rubén Galindo, a
29-year-old Mexican and self-described
freedom fighter, co-founded the e-wallet
service Airtm in 2015. The app serves, in
his words, as an “over-the-counter dol-
lar market.” The company publishes its
own exchange rates and allows users,
or “agents,” to execute currency trades
between their own bank accounts.
In 2018, Galindo says he received a
tip that Venezuela’s intelligence police
were planning to detain his local staff,
so he spirited the 25-person crew over
the border into Colombia and then to
Mexico, where the company is head-
quartered. “They shut down one, or
they imprison one, or whatever. We
canadd 10 more,”saysGalindo,ona
video call from Mexico City. Airtm has
customers throughout Latin America,
he says, but much of its business is
in Venezuela, where it moves about
$11 million a week.
Airtm was thrust into the limelight
in August, when Juan Guaidó, head of
the opposition-led National Assembly,
whom the Trump administration and
almost 60 other governments have rec-
ognized as Venezuela’s rightful leader,
tapped the service to execute the trans-
fer of almost $19 million to health-care
workers on the front lines of the coun-
try’s coronavirus battle. The funds
were supplied by the U.S. Treasury’s
Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)
from frozen U.S. accounts belonging to
Venezuela’s central bank.
Galindo says he flew to Miami in
March to work with Guaidó’s economic
team on the OFAC-approved operation,
dubbed Health Heroes, to send more
than 62,000 pandemic responders three
monthly payments of $100 each. When
Maduro got wind of the plan, he ordered
Airtm’s IP address blocked. But themoneybegantricklinginbySeptember
with the aid of virtual private networks,
or VPNs, that can be used to log onto
restricted websites. Galindo says about
60% of the funds have been disbursed.
“We were built for this, for exactly this.
We’re not going to leave Venezuela any-
time soon,” he says.
Violeta Blanco, a nurse at a children’s
hospital in Valencia, says it took her
many attempts to transfer the funds from
Airtm to the bank account of a friend in
Panama who would see she got dollar
bills. Blanco and her colleagues were up
until 3 a.m. some nights, trying to figure
out the mechanics of the service while
navigatingblackoutsanddroppedinter-
netconnections.“Wehadnoideawhata
VPNwas,norae-wallet,” she says.
The first $100 payment came
through on Sept. 16. “I was so excited
and went out and bought medicine
for my high blood pressure,” says
Blanco,who justa day earlierhad
beenpaid herfortnightlysalaryof
600,000bolívares. That’s the equiva-
lent of about $1.10. <BW> �With assistance
from Ben Bartenstein and Nicolle Yapur� Supermarkets have dedicated lines for customers paying with Zelle
to unlock an account in a pandemic?”