Crypto.com accidentally transfers $10.5m to woman instead of $100

Because companies go bankrupt by not having the money, while the woman bought a house approximately equal in value to the cash.

If she had gambled it all at the casino, they'd have no recourse either: She might go to jail, but they wouldn't get their money back.

Crypto.com fully reimbursed all 483 accounts that were hacked [1].

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/20/cryptocom-says-...

> Why is crypto.com able to retrieve their funds in this case, but crypto hacks around the world result in customers being told there's no recourse?

A business mistakenly sending an obviously excessive refund to a customer over a normal wire transfer is not a new phenomenon. There is precedence, courts are familiar with it, and the parties are few and identified. Exchanges getting custodied digital assets stolen is not really comparable from a legal perspective.

(Answering your actual question of "why..", not addressing if this makes sense or is right)

> Doesn't appear crypto.com paid back the $34M that was stolen from customers in the hack a few months back.

They did AFAIK.

> The crypto crowd sure like regulations at the most unexpected times.

What are you referring to here exactly? Who likes what regulation?

Because despite what monopoly says “bank error in your favour” doesn’t entitle you to that money.

The ability to revert transactions is a well-known feature of regular bank transactions, and that’s what this is about.

In most countries you do not get to keep accidentally transferred funds and attempting to do so can constitute theft. If you receive money you know you shouldn't have, call the bank, don't spend it.

>Surely there is ground for "the mistake is yours, the money is gone" approach

not really. Pretty much every jurisdiction has laws regarding transaction errors, you can't just go blow a couple of millions just because someone made faulty transaction. If you notice random amounts of money in your account, don't go out and spend it.

Australian law has the concept of "unjust enrichment". If you receive a payment that is mistaken you have a prima facie obligation to make restitution.

Go for the free interest and repay the 10mil when asked. In this case would have been 7 months worth

Looks like your friend is traveling to beautiful Vanuatu ;) https://nomadcapitalist.com/expat/the-best-non-extradition-c...

Convert the value into high-value commodities (e.g. gold, diamonds); get those insured; and then have a friend steal them from you. Collect the insurance money. (You’ll use this to repay the transfer.)

Have the friend fence the goods. (In the case of diamonds, intentionally write down the serial numbers incorrectly so that your friend can launder them without being caught.)

Put the cleaned money into an offshore account owned by a shell company with identity protection. Contract your services to said shell company with a very high rate.

reinvest and then use the winnings to buy the entire company in a hostile takeover. and then dissolve it.

company gone, no entity to pursue the lawsuit.

Place the funds back into a crypto.com account, transfer the funds through a tumbler into a wallet you control.

Open support ticket with crypto.com saying you've been phished and that the funds are gone. Make sure to capture in writing their response that funds cannot be recovered.

Wait for them to try to recover funds. Forward them their own email and explain that you did return the funds but then they were lost and can't be recovered.

Buy a friend's mansion using very inflated valuation. When the judge orders you to sell in order to paid Crypto.com back, sell for true value. Enter bankruptcy (since you cannot afford the difference) and discharge your debt. Friend later gives you half.

It's fun to think about. I think it would be hard to make the most of the money and have a great lifestyle while keeping a low profile and not getting caught.

It costs a lot less than $10M if you want to move to Thailand and live off-grid in some remote area. You can probably do that for a lot less than $100,000, including a Thailand Elite Visa. If that's part of your plan, then just hold onto the money and earn interest, or maybe give it back and hope for a reward. Or just save up the money normally, it's not that much.

I wonder if it's still possible to change your identity in a developed country. Maybe you could move to a new country and start using a fake passport to establish your new identity over time. But I think that stopped being possible sometime in the 90s or early 2000s.

I found it stressful enough just to move to a new country and get a visa legally. I can't imagine also worrying about getting extradited and sent to prison at any moment. Sounds like a terrible life. I wouldn't keep the money.

EDIT: Just reading some of the other replies, and wow, there are some genius criminals in here. Maybe I would take the money!

Do like the banks- call it identity theft and let the exchange deal with it.

They mastered victim-blaming.

- but used laptop at the flea market, bonus points if out of town

- log to your crypto.scam account from 'behind 7 proxies' using free wifi

- transfer funds to some crypto mixer, then multiple private wallets

- delete account or change password

- zero fill storage, throw away laptop

- few days later report losing access to your crypto.scam assets

- wait couple of years

That might be how you want it to work. But isn't how the laws of Australia work.

This is exactly the kind of thing a newly cashed up bogan would do.

It just said a multimillion dollar place. She could have bought a $2M house.

They might have done the rational thing and tried to make money using the funds mistakenly transfered to them. It's unlikely the courts will demand they turn over gains due to the increase in the value of real estate.

Australians are obsessed with the property market in a way few from outside the country can understand. It is very uncommon to invest in securities here, compared to pumping more money into housing.

No, but the tax office will smash you with some pretty hefty capital gains taxes I believe

She would have to declare it in tax time, particularly as it's a large sum of money which is being pushed through companies (bank, crypto.com) which I presume are both obliged to comply with reporting obligations and KYC stuff. If she didn't, such a windfall would definitely set off an alarm somewhere, because Australian taxation data gathering is all automatically done by the government and pretty decent. I suspect that there is a simple legal mechanism for crypto.com to come in with and legally request their money back too, for that matter, in the same way we've seen banks get money back from people who take advantage of malfunctioning ATMs and swipe extra bills.

If we assume it was a crypto gain, every crypto transaction needs to be accounted for in a tax return, and capital gains/losses reported at every step, so there's that.

> Lack of controls and auditing is the real news. How do you not notice $10m dollars missing? Is there anyone reviewing refunds?

Maybe you haven't realized but Crypto.com has been splurging way larger sums than that on advertising in sports, I'm guessing that much like many during the +60K ATH levels they were burning so much capital due to the immense gains and only realized this after an accountant did a final year analysis for tax purposes (they base din HK if I recall). Exchanges, even unicorn YC backed ones like CONbase, have been shown to be extremely horrible at these kind of things; which is why it's so often repeated to take your coins off an exchange and have self-custody.

I'd like to say that after 10+ years we would have already learned from all the mistakes and came away with all there is to operate an exchange, specifically a KYC/AML one with it's larger budget for auditing and misc overhead, but the truth is that other than a quick on/off ramp exchanges are the most broken link in the Bitcoin ecosystem because of the nature of how they operate. This is just another example, and it was given to her in cash by the sound of things.

Ultimately this is why Decentralized Exchanges have and will continue to be so imperative: Bitsquare, now BISQ has been the shiny beacon of what and how you should operate: slow and steady wins the race, while companies like MTGOX lie in the wake as a reminder of what happens when you have central points of failure.

With that said, 10 million is a large sum, but its not much with the volume that gets transacted on the BTC network for larger whales, and there are many based out of HK.

I hear some newer ones do have this. I do think clawback mechanisms are essential to a functioning financial system.

There is, you can relatively easily write a txn that put one or more arbitrator in place that are able to reverse transactions if m of n of them agree or something.

This was a fat-fingered fiat refund. They only realized 7 months later. What was that about banks saving people from stuff like this?