7 ms·
Crypto.com accidentally transfers $10.5m to woman instead of $100
- oski 4y agoOh the irony.
- superchroma 4y agoOh no!
- cratermoon 4y agoA shame there's no reconciliation ability on the blockchain.
- superchroma 4y agoI hear some newer ones do have this. I do think clawback mechanisms are essential to a functioning financial system.
- aeternum 4y agoThere 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.
- 3np 4y agoThis was a fat-fingered fiat refund. They only realized 7 months later. What was that about banks saving people from stuff like this?
- maxbond 4y agoIf they'd called the bank the next day, the bank would certainly have reversed the transaction. If they'd made a fat finger error on the blockchain, there would be no one to call. It's entirely possible for a fat finger error to send $10M to a nonexistant blockchain address, so you can't even work it out with your counterparty; the money has been destroyed (assuming the network is secure in the first place). If you think this is how money should work, or how a certain settlement layer should work with reversals implemented in a higher layer, fine. But this incident is certainly not a counterexample to this argument.
- thrwyoilarticle 4y agoIs there a need to explain where the funds to buy a house came from in Australia? Or do they just explain it away as crypto gains?
- King-Aaron 4y agoNo, but the tax office will smash you with some pretty hefty capital gains taxes I believe
- jbverschoor 4y agoHere you’ll have to explain the source, no matter what. Also, your bank will simply be bought with such a large irregular transaction. The story or the government had holes in au
- superchroma 4y agoShe 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.
- outjected 4y agoFortune Favors the Brave
- zbird 4y agoDoes Australia have no property tax? In what Earth do you sink a one-time $10.5m payment into a house you can't maintain? Perhaps I am missing something very fundamental here. I can think of much better uses for those funds anyway.
- rubychill 4y agoThis is exactly the kind of thing a newly cashed up bogan would do.
- siggi_pop 4y ago
- googlryas 4y agoIt just said a multimillion dollar place. She could have bought a $2M house.
- nitwit005 4y agoThey 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.
- willdr 4y agoAustralians 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.
- gzer0 4y agoCould you perhaps expand a bit further on this? I have always been intrigued by the Australian housing market, would like to learn more about why people from the AU don't really invest in securities and dump into housing alone.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
- martin1975 4y agoDoes this qualify as a crypto joyride?
- Maursault 4y agoHow could one benefit from an error like this and escape with all the money? Transfer to an offshore account and head to a country with no extradition to Australia? Would that work? Asking for a friend.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kirykl 4y agoGo for the free interest and repay the 10mil when asked. In this case would have been 7 months worth
- nopenopenopeno 4y agoaround 100K
- tromp 4y agoWe still suffer negative interest rates here in Holland [1]. [1] https://www.abnamro.nl/nl/prive/rente/negatieve-rente.html https://www.abnamro.nl/nl/prive/rente/negatieve-rente.html
- 0xChain 4y agoLooks like your friend is traveling to beautiful Vanuatu ;) https://nomadcapitalist.com/expat/the-best-non-extradition-countries-to-be-invisible/ https://nomadcapitalist.com/expat/the-best-non-extradition-c...
- derefr 4y agoConvert 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.
- HWR_14 4y agoDid it take 7 months for them to notice or did it take 7 months of declining crypto prices and valuations for $10.5 million to be worth the hit to their reputation.
- keyle 4y agoThey have to sell the property and send the $10m back? I don't get that. Surely there is ground for "the mistake is yours, the money is gone" approach? Wouldn't you fight this, since it happened 9 months later? I understand they're free riding the cash, but they didn't make the mistake. So in my mind, they didn't steal the money? Let me put it this way... if it were $1,000 over $100 instead of $10M, would they go so hard after the money? I'm pretty sure that whatever contract they signed with crypto.com didn't say repay us if we overpay you during a refund...
- bragr 4y agoIn 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.
- keyle 4y agoInteresting, thanks.
- Gigachad 4y agoIf $10M showed up in my account unexpectedly I'd be calling both the bank and the police. You'd have to be a complete idiot to think you can play finders keepers on $10M, especially buying a house with it. 9 months is well within the regular window too. Would be different if it showed up 10 years later.
- fierro 4y agothat's not what a true Gigachad would say
- alphabetting 4y agoDepends on how much resources you have to fight for the money accidentally sent to you. It's more complex than this case but here's a good story here on how Citigroup accidently wired $900M to a group of hedge funds and eventually lost in court trying to get it back: https://archive.ph/PJH1m https://archive.ph/PJH1m Their first reaction was mostly “well this is weird, I guess Revlon decided to pay off the loan rather than fight about it.” Their second reaction, after Citi sent them frantic notices saying it was a mistake, was to send each other Bloomberg chat messages making fun of Citi. Their third reaction, after some more serious reflection, was to say “we are keeping the money, see you in court.” All of these reactions were pretty reasonable and worked out well for them.
- naikrovek 4y agoif it took them seven months to realize their mistake, it's their fault. if the money was important to them they would have discovered their error much sooner; before the money even left their hands. crypto companies are comprised of infants crawling around the floor drooling on things while wearing tailored suits and carrying mobile phones.
- Gigachad 4y agoThat might be how you want it to work. But isn't how the laws of Australia work.
- naikrovek 4y agono kidding. thanks, the mention of the court case and the ruling in favor of crypto.com in the article didn't make that clear. it doesn't matter what the law says in comparison to what actually should happen, and what really matters. in this case the law sides the rich, instead of siding against the incompetent people who made the mistake. that doesn't make the law right, or moral, or even justifiable, it just means that the rich likely control legislation in Australia. it's still crypto.com's fault, and their own money wasn't important enough to them for any validation in the form which the operator entered the wrong data into the "amount" field. they fucked up, no matter what the law says. the money wasn't stolen, and should not need to be returned. the company that lost the money (literally) gifted it to the customer by mistake, and didn't catch it's own mistake for SEVEN months.
- devnulll 4y agoWhy 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? Doesn't appear crypto.com paid back the $34M that was stolen from customers in the hack a few months back. The crypto crowd sure like regulations at the most unexpected times.
- MichaelBurge 4y agoBecause 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.
- fierro 4y agothe highest EV outcome for her was to hit the Wynn
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gzer0 4y agoCrypto.com fully reimbursed all 483 accounts that were hacked [1]. [1] https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/20/cryptocom-says-hackers-stole-nearly-34m-from-users/ https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/20/cryptocom-says-...
- 3np 4y ago> 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?
- adrr 4y agoLack of controls and auditing is the real news. How do you not notice $10m dollars missing? Is there anyone reviewing refunds?
- Melting_Harps 4y ago> 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.
- adrr 4y agoWife works at a large FI with trillions of dollars worth of assets of under management. They notice when pennies are missing because of a rounding error(eg: some picked the wrong type of rounding in their excel sheet). Just because you deal with large amounts of money, doesn't mean you can't have controls.
- 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pushingice 4y agoWhat I find amusing is that they paid her an amount of money equal to her account number. Lucky for them crypto.com hasn't been around that long. My bank account has 10 digits.
- tromp 4y agoMore info at https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/crypto-firm-tries-to-seize-luxury-home-after-accidentally-sending-sisters-10m/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/crypto-firm-trie... The recipient, Thevamanogari Manivel, didn’t notify Crypto.com, instead allegedly transferring funds to bank accounts held by her and her family. Crypto.com claims Manivel used the money to buy her sister Thilagavathy Gangadory a modern $1.35M house, complete with a home gym and theater.