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Comment by jwie | Hacker News Reader

It’s unfortunate. Though what do you expect when possession is ownership and there’s no mediating institution to help you with theft.

If your brokerage account somehow gets hacked and all your funds gets stolen that’s not an unsolvable problem. You’ll likely get made whole after a while. There’s people, institutions, and laws to help you.

Store digital cash in your mattress and someone will steal it, and no one will or can help.

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It may come as a surprise you to that the recovery rate for BEC incidents that are not immediately detected is very low and that victims often spend years suing their banks for faulty fraud protection in court for either only a partial settlement or nothing in return.

Not only BEC, the recovery rate for ridiculously named authorized push payment fraud fraud (i.e. craigslist car scams) is also very low.

Reg E at least protects consumers from some banking malware, but still does not provide protections for phishing victims (despite new non-binding CFPB guidance)

Having worked in banking for 20 years and knowing how many fraud transactions are reversed, I do indeed find that false information to be surprising.

It's very well documented that less than 20% of BEC losses in the US are recovered.

> The challenge is that most BEC attacks will use bank accounts outside the US. In truth, the IC3 RAT recovered less than 14% of the total US$2.4 billion in BEC losses last year.

https://www.welivesecurity.com/2022/04/26/trouble-bec-how-st...

https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA220504

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