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Comment by kooshball | Hacker News Reader

easier than you think.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/15/how-one-familys-nightmare-il...

https://www.nar.realtor/wire-fraud

Those are all intentionally sending money; you just have had someone tell you the wrong account. Which is just as easy with crypto. And, just like with crypto, you can always reach out to the party you are trying to send money to via another means to confirm the address.

When I purchased a house, I Googled the recipient, confirmed the certificate, Googled the number found on their website separately to confirm it was listed elsewhere as belonging to the company I expected it to belong to, called it, and got them to tell me the account details for the wire transfer, confirming it matched what I had been sent. Which, to their credit, their instructions also told me to do. And I initially sent the down payment, confirmed they received that, and only later in the process sent the remainder.

While there still are some ways to beat that (compromise the recipient's infrastructure, change the website, lock out the recipient from their email, insert into the email exchange, get a wire transfer done before the recipient can proactively call the target to warn them), it's a lot harder to pull off than "find a target that won't read the code very closely".

It's rare that buyers of houses and property are that thorough. On the contrary, my friend recently bought a plot of land for which the sellers did not own the title. The title company, who's only job is to verify this, completely missed it. The fake sellers made out with tens of thousands of dollars and the real owners, who are from Germany, are still haggling with my friend and trying to get her or the title company to pay for their lawyer fees, and she still doesn't have title to the land!

At least with crypto, the chain of ownership is transparent and can't be faked. So validation is cheap and easy to do.

Where is the land mentioned? Is there no land registry there? In many jurisdictions, titles to land are registered through a government operated registry where would-be buyers could look up information on the situation of the land rights.

AFAIK you don't need to be a title company to do this, any buyer could do it themselves.

And what if you don't know enough about land law to make sense of everything? That's when you need companies to do it for you.

Is checking the chain of ownership of cryptocurrencies easier than land? It depends whether you're talking to a real estate lawyer or a NFT seller.

I'm neither, and I don't see the intrinsic difference.

>> At least with crypto, the chain of ownership is transparent and can't be faked. So validation is cheap and easy to do.

In theory. The devil is in the details; does everyone know how to validate the chain of ownership, even the most non-technical of users who must rely on the system? If not, you either will never be mainstream, or you're reliant on a trusted agent to validate on your behalf (sorta like a title company!).

And if you screw something up with crypto, there is no way to address it. The complaint of "dealing with lawyers and trying to get someone to pay for it" is a feature, not a bug. Worst case, it's no different than the crypto outcome; best case, you have recourse.

Man, BoA sure lets a lot through. I couldn't even wire 8k without my physical presence - this was during COVID lockdown of all things as well! I know nothing of buying a house, but when I bought another, more expensive car that required a loan, the bank went through the whole rigamaroo calling a bunch of people to verify all the details (after all, I was going to buy their car with their money) - took nearly an hour to actually get the money after being approved for the loan days beforehand with all their internal busywork. All for something that, what, might have covered half of the wages for the day of the employees working there at the branch office after three years of interest? I think I'll be staying with my tiny, irrelevant local bank after all!

I worked at a financial institution, no way you could open an account, deposit some spare change, and then withdraw 900k after a few weeks especially in America. Compliance would be all over that account, which is probably why they got the money back anyhow because the crooks would have a lot of talking to do after getting that much money in their account. KYC and AML is required for both sides of the wire transfer.

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