asterix75;453421Xoom does not let you transfer money to an NRE/NRO account does it? This is what is under User Agreement on Xoom.com
MTSS payments are reserved for personal inward remittances only. Commercial/business remittances and remittances toward the purchase of property, investments or credit to non-residents' accounts (NRE or NRO) and donations/contributions to charitable organizations are prohibited.
This is the issue/major drawback with so called XOOM. Also as one poster said, XOOM does/will not ask for SSN while registering unlike all other major Indian exchange companies like Citi, SBI,Axis do. One real advantage of XOOM is while others take 5 business days to get our money to India, XOOM is real quick, with in 2 days you will have the INR in a savings account in India but not in a NRE account.
What I heard is that per law/rule from RBI, whatever money we transfer to India should be going through a NRE/NRO account. Once the money is in NRE/NRO account, we shall make a money transfer to a local savings account. Any learned/aware NRI can validate this.
XOOM does not do this, They are bypassing this NRE/NRO accounts in the above route. Also It is not safe to use XOOM. Since there is no SSN involved, it is not possible to track who transferred what amount. I had a bad/worst experience from XOOM. Someone who stole my bank account # used XOOM to transfer around 200 USD from my Wells fargo Checking account to their indian savings account. When I came to know about this, I checked with XOOM, for which they responded they have no clue on who/whose savings account in India received the amount. Wells Fargo from their end, on receiving this response from XOOM, reimbursed this money to me(by this time, all of my checking/savings account is closed and new ones created to further stop any money transfers).
Hence my suggestion is unless you want INR immediately, do not use XOOM. Other exchange providers like SBI, Citi, old good ICICI money 2 India are safe and standard ones.