From the article is not very clear how the cybercriminals exactly pulled this off (i.e. by simply changing the IBAN or also by changing the name of the recipien

From the article is not very clear how the cybercriminals exactly pulled this off (i.e. by simply changing the IBAN or also by changing the name of the recipient of the transfer). Isn't banking system supposed to protect from this kind of stuff? I mean, is not responsability of banks to ensure that the recipient of the transfer is indeed the one specified by the sender? Or one should consider a (wrong) placed banking transfer simply gone? The (non-)reversibility of transfers is one of the main arguments against crypto-currencies, and yet this kind of events seems to be happening with banks anyway. My family runs a small-medium business and a couple of years back we were victim of something very similar. I'm a professional penetration tester myself (not to brag but I'm pretty sure my family company is pretty secure), anyway as we were the victim here (the one that were not paid in the process), there was no way for us (me) to detect the issue (at the technical level) up until it was too late. What happened is that one of our customer got their email compromised, and attackers were literally man-in-the-middleing all of their emails. When they detected some bills and payments requests from us, they simply forwarded them back to our customers using a fresh registered domain name that looked a lot like ours. In the process they did alter the attachment, to change indeed the IBAN. To keep it short, when we realized that something was wrong it was too late, and banks even refused to pay our customer back. We did report the event to the authorities, however to this day we did not hear anything back :) TL;DR Attackers compromised some customers' emails, altering the IBAN in the attachments in the process. Customer did pay attackers instead of the legitimate company, and bank could not undo things. Is sending money to a wrong IBAN the same as sending it to a wrong wallet address for crypto-currencies? Not a big fan myself, but if there are no guarantees we might as well do the switch. Only a rant