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.
>Neither company explained to CNBC how they were able to recover the stolen funds. In most cases, they’re lost forever.
Granted, that is still losing money irreversibly, but it's not the same thing.
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.
maybe, but good luck prosecuting/recovering it if it's outside your country's jurisdiction.
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.
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.
Correction: Citigroup didn't owe the money, they were acting on behalf of Revlon, who owed the money.
Banks are not perfect, but at least they pay up if you run into one of those imperfections. Usually.
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.