There is a thread on a gambling forum I frequent where a guy won 25k betting sports and has to pay $700 for a wire...... $40 wires are standard. I requested 2k from bodog and it took a month to get a weird cheque from the phillipines ie from the other side of the world.
That's because of the way that payment processors route payments in order to try to get around online gambling laws. There were millions of dollars frozen in offshore payment processor accounts when the US DoJ cracked down on online gambling.
I have pressed, but never gotten a credible answer, as to why MtGox cannot just wire the funds and let the recipient bear the risk that their beloved government will delay them. At least MtGox would have a solid reply: "Look, we sent the funds on XX/XX/2012, here is the reference number and a copy of the proof we initiated it. It is out of our hands now."
If I knew money had been sent my way and that they were being "investigated", I'd be fine with that, knowing that I'm not a criminal and that the funds would eventually make it to me. I'd be far more fine with that versus the funds never having been sent, which is what seems to be the case with all of the wire-related complaints on the forum.
This can be a difficult problem. Many nations have AML/CTF laws which prevent "tipping off" which essentially means that you're not allowed to tell a customer that you regard a transaction as suspicious or that it's been reported as a suspicious matter. You can ask them about the origin and the destination of the funds, but that's about it. This becomes complicated if you go to wire money and the bank then wants enhanced KYC information on your customer.
The bank is perfectly within its rights to refuse any transaction for any reason, but it can certainly refuse to process a transaction until adequate KYC information has been provided - but because of the laws against tipping off, when this situation occurs the originating FSP/MSB has to be extremely careful about what information they disclose to the customer.
Transactions which have the appearance of structuring or which raise that money is being sent to fake account holders create another bureaucratic nightmare - service providers once again have to try to determine the legitimacy of the transactions without alerting the customer to any investigation (there's no actual law against dividing up transactions but they have to investigate it for possible AML activity and report it if they cannot establish legitimacy).
If you read the cases where financial services providers have been fined in the millions of dollars for non-compliance with AML/CTF/KYC regulations, it's an eye-opener just how much FSPs are required to monitor customer transactions on an on-going basis and the extent to which they're expected to investigate anything even vaguely "suspicious".
Mt Gox is stuck with multiple AML/KYC requirements. They have to create their own framework under Japanese law and comply with that. They must also comply with the requirements of Dwolla and other payment processors and additionally they need to comply with the requirements of their banks. These will not always mesh seamlessly as the broad principals of AML/KYC/CTF regulations are similar in FATF countries but each individual financial services provider develops their own way of implementing them.
In addition to any AML/KYC/CTF requirements, any FPS also needs to have algorithms which identify possibly fraudulent transactions. It's not hard to see why 5% of transactions can end up being flagged for one reason or another and when you're moving millions of dollars each month that means that hundreds of thousands can get tied up for varying periods of time.
This isn't unique to Bitcoin exchanges. Stored value of any kind has become a major magnet for fraud and money laundering and payment processors are starting to freeze accounts through which people are moving larger amounts than would reasonably be expected.