[SamBam]

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.

[gruez]

>If you wire money to the wrong place, and that person won't return it, that's theft.

maybe, but good luck prosecuting/recovering it if it's outside your country's jurisdiction.

[Cthulhu_]

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.

[AndrewStephens]

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.

[lewilewilewi]

While this is true, it might be costly (as it has been for Citigroup) https://www.ft.com/content/a50cd095-2811-41ab-b783-b09944691...

[hyperpape]

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.

[consp]

Only as a company or government, as a person you are usually out of luck and get a "bank says no".