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by gruez 2018 days ago
>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.

2 comments

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.