This is a sad story and a good example of why the much-ballyhooed immutability of cryptocurrency transactions is an anti-feature for the vast majority of users.
I have waded into crypto twice. Both times I have lost access and the funds are gone. I don't care what happens with Bitcoin, I'm staying away from it.
Nope. Literally just wired money to a wrong account number (banker mistyped one digit). It was sent back. Sure, if you get tricked into wiring to a fraudster, they can keep your money. However, nothing in the banking system is like this unless you put your money as cash in a bag and burn it.
No you wouldn't. You could almost certainly recover the money.
If you wire money to the wrong place, and that person won't return it, that's theft. Likewise, if someone suddenly receives an unexpected million dollars in the account, they should not consider spending it -- that would be a big mistake.
Thankfully, accidentally transferring money abroad is not trivial. It being not user friendly is an advantage there. It often takes time to process as well, so while it's still pending you can undo the transfer.
Over here, for a European transfer you need to fill in an IBAN number, which contains the country code of the destination. The transfer will fail as well if you don't provide the right name with the number.
For international transfers, you need to provide even more information like BIC numbers, etc.
With crypto, it's a random address. If you or someone else manipulates the address by even a single bit, it's gone.
Two things: It is quite hard to wire money to the wrong address. There are a lot of checks and I have been quite impressed with every bank I have dealt with being diligent in ringing me up to confirm the details, even for relatively small amounts.
Secondly, unless the destination person/organization is actually criminal, reversing a mistake is usually a phone call/polite letter away. If that fails then the legal system is there.
I guess wiring money to a criminal by mistake is possible but it seems unlikely. Deliberately wiring money to a criminal is very possible but you are on your own there. And even then it should be possible to track them down using the destination bank account unless the bank itself is shady.
Crypto has all of the disadvantages of wiring money (I guess it is usually cheaper) with none of the advantages.
I can no longer find a good source, but I believe in the Citigroup case, they owed that money, it is just that instead of making a standard monthly payment, they paid a large fraction (maybe even all?) of what was owed. That's quite different from sending money into the ether/random recipient. That makes matters substantially more difficult.
Correction: Citigroup didn't owe the money, they were acting on behalf of Revlon, who owed the money.
Nope; banks can and will reverse transfers, and if the money was transferred fraudulently, THEY will take the blame for it (because in essence their security failed, even if you are the one that initiated the transfer). Banks have a fund to compensate victims, and banks are connected to national and international banks and regulatory bodies (like the ECB) to get you out of shit creek if there is a problem.
Banks are not perfect, but at least they pay up if you run into one of those imperfections. Usually.
Banks (especially banks in the same country) can send funds back, that's not the same thing as reversing the transfer. Both SEPA and SWIFT transfers are irreversible. It's even possible to steal money from a central bank by transferring money away with SWIFT.
The only real difference is that it's not legal to keep mistakenly sent funds, making irreversible mistakes less likely to happen.
I mean hell, when I was in the UK our landlord gave us the wrong banking info and we were paying for 6 months to the wrong account! I don't know how our landlords went 6 months without knowing they weren't getting paid.. but once they told us I called the bank and they were able to contact the owner of the account it was going into and pull the funds back to the correct account.
Now sure if the owner of this "wrong" account was doing something sketchy it would have been more complicated, but there still would have been as full of recourse as possible. It's not your money just because the bank puts wrong money in your acct.
And sure wire's are a bit more complicated..
But yeah- end of the day the banks are able to do something if it's legit.