>I am yet to work with a payment method that does not support reversal (except for physical cash). As a last resort victims can file chargeback with their issuers or police.
What about the stories of companies being scammed via wire transfer?
This isn't a scam, it's robbery/theft, which is an important distinction. If you're robbed at an ATM the bank will make you whole. If someone lies to you and asks for money, you go to an ATM and give it to them, the bank isn't going to do anything about it.
You would consider this robbery/theft? Had an in person sale with money sent over cashapp and they charged me 250 dollars more, as the item received was half of what I expected. This was automotive fluids, not drugs lol. I had stupidly sent the money before I checked. Cashap didn’t do anything and figured I messed up so why go to bank.
Wire transfers can be reversed in some cases but it's not as simple as filing a chargeback; AFAIK it requires cooperation between law enforcement and the recipient bank.
Definitely have been cases where they have not been able to reverse transfers of this type, even for huge sums, where they know exactly where the money went ie. the bank and the specific accounts:
Right, not having worked with it my knowledge of SWIFT is at a superficial level. So I actually followed Bangladesh heist because it's a fascinating at multiple levels.
The net loss was in fact minuscule (in % terms) compared to the attempted amount. Summarising from the article you linked.
> ....illegally transfer close to US$1 billion
> ..The Federal Reserve Bank of New York blocked..US$850 million
> ..with US$20 million traced to Sri Lanka...recovered
> ..traced..US$81 million to the Philippines...out of which US$18 million has been recovered.
So the actual loss is ~US$60 million. I would say the system has worked as intended, for sure there's a scope for improvement which I'm sure are being worked upon. Also I imagine the 4 individuals, the final recipients of the money are being pursued.
If I do a thought exercise with bitcoin; what are the potential options to prevent such a heist? I would imagine within an hour or so $1B would get distributed to to thousands of wallets. Sure, you could trace all of that, but then what? Would you instruct the Blockchain network to not authorise any spends originating from those addresses? Kind of maintain a black list?
There have been several proposals that would delay large crypto transactions by 24 hours or require them to be approved by multiple people. In no case are transactions reversed, but the idea is to introduce enough friction that hacking/fraud won't be effective.
And for someone that has never done it before, it's absolutely terrifying – probably the most money you've ever spent in your life in a single transaction, with zero visibility into whether the transaction has worked, and fraud warnings in big red letters to let you know that if you're going to get robbed or scammed, it's probably right here that it will happen.
And be prepared to wait 24 - 72 hours for final confirmation!
What about the stories of companies being scammed via wire transfer?