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by acdha 850 days ago
This is a great example: most of the fraudulent transactions were blocked by the NY Federal Reserve – $850M – and of the remaining $101M, a significant amount was recovered:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery

https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-57520169

Not perfect, but 90-something percent better than no recourse. More importantly, it’s also not a given that individuals lose everything as opposed to higher operating costs for a bank. The kinds of crimes we see in the cryptocurrency world tend to leave individuals with no recourse other than very expensive private investigations, whereas a major financial institution at least had the resources to go after the money without going bankrupt.

1 comments

That was a complete dumb luck accident due to a spelling mistake.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/spelling-mista...

Note that the rest of the money disappeared quite effectively.

> Note that the rest of the money disappeared quite effectively.

No, I’d suggest reading the article I shared. Some of the money was laundered successfully but they recovered tens of millions and the bank in the Philippines which didn’t help was heavily fined. The SWIFT system developers also took this very seriously and added additional safeguards, which seems like a better sign of safety for a financial system than mocking them for having poor opsec and saying they should have used a hardware wallet like the cryptocurrency world tends to do.