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Wire transfers aren't reversible if you're not quick enough to do it before the money transfers out of the country. Home purchases and business wires have both seen over a billion dollars in wire fraud annually, just in the US.

https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/mortgage-wire-fraud

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2022/08/3...




Wire transfers are also reversible. It may not be easy or cheap to do so, but it is possible (the Citigroup $500mm mispayment is a great example: the error was done August 2020, and Citigroup are still working to undo it, at an expense to them. I'm certain it'll take them a few more months, and God only knows how many more billable hours at the very least).


This is reversible in the sense that every transaction is reversible in some form. Somebody stole your wallet? Chase them down in the parking lot and reverse the transaction.


In practice for more common fraud cases, we're seeing billions of dollars actually lost. Maybe the expense of retrieval would be higher than the value. Or it could be that the perps simply convert the money to cash, at which point it's gone. That's basically what happened to the $81 million fraudulently transferred from Bangladesh's account with the NY Fed:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/03/magazine/mone...


Is it still reversible when the money is sent to Turkey or Kazakhstan and tracing and investigating the ultimate destination of where it went (likely to a bunch of bank accounts set up by nominees or stolen identities and ultimately to Binance or the local equivalent) would require almost as much money as the loss?


Yes, if the funds are not taken away from the destination account and if the Turkish/Kazakh bank is cooperative, but not when funds are cleared out of Kazakh/Turkish banks.


They may be cooperative but they may also take 3 months to respond especially if it is a request from another country. At which point you're SOL.




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