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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

How? People send money to the wrong account all of the time in traditional finance. It is not a solved problem.

The ability, through various means, of reversing the transaction or otherwise redirecting funds to the correct recipient, is what's been solved.

Which is what happened here. I imagine traditionally one bank asks the other bank to reverse the transaction. Here one exchange asks the other exchange to reverse the transaction.

From the link:

> Recap:

> - cryptodotcom sent 320k ETH to Gate

> - Gate sends 285k back

This solution is also a major source of chargeback fraud, FWIW. The people who get screwed from that aren't financial institutions, it's merchants - often small mom and pop shops that lack the resources of predatory multinational corporations to challenge this type of activity.

From their perspective, protection from chargebacks is protection from fraud.

Well, show me these mom and pop shops (that aren't dark web drug dealers or porn sellers) that won't accept credit cards and will only accept crypto payments. Despite the chargeback fraud (an entirely different problem than what this thread was discussing, by the way) basically nobody has abandoned credit cards and gone crypto-only.

They can almost always claw it back.

Yes, but not always:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-laws...

But always: https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/citigroup-wins-appeal-ove...

Citibank won on appeal: https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/citigroup-wins-appeal-ove...

Citigroup Inc is entitled to recoup about $500 million of its own money that it accidentally wired Revlon Inc lenders three years early, a U.S. appeals court said on Thursday. Reversing a lower court ruling, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said it was improper to give the lenders a "huge windfall" by letting them keep Citigroup's money, and that they had been on notice the wiring was a mistake.

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