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Comment by marc__1 | Hacker News Reader

you don't need to go that far back in time to find banking issues basically in every major geography, with different kinds of currencies, digital or not.

Case in point:

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

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/21/europe/vatican-bank-money-lau...

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/bank-julius-baer-agrees-pay-m...

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Money laundering is a different kind of a problem from what we're talking about here, though. Those are mostly KYC or internal controls failures - I'm not saying they're a good thing but they're not impacting other customers of the bank really.

Find some recent example of the owners of a bank/exchange absconding with their client funds: that would be closer to the matter at hand.

Wirecard :)

But you’re right. Mostly the normal banks and exchanges are regulated and incidence of fraud is low. A lot of that regulation is “lessons from past failures”, which crypto hasn’t had yet.

Wirecard wasn't a bank/exchange either. But a payment processor. It was fraudulent though.

Did any customers actually lose money over the Wirecard thing, or was it just the shareholders and lenders that lost out? I couldn't immediately find anything about customer losses.

As far as I know, they weren't any customer losses.

Last example of a bank failure where ordinary people lost a lot of money I’d say was the failure of Lehman Brothers. Lots of risk averse retail investors were sold Lehman certificates with somewhat better yields (“mini-bonds”) because Lehman paid high commissions to the retail banks, eg in Germany and Hong Kong.

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