Wire info can only be used to send money OUT. It's sender initiated. You can't initiate a debit of funds from someone's account using the mechanism.
So you can safely give someone wire information without having to worry about someone draining your account with it (and then have to deal with your bank's fraud department trying to claw it back).
Also, if someone receives funds via wire, they can be 99.9%+ sure the funds are theirs and will stay there indefinitely.
Reversing it would require either a major bank error (which happens, but is usually pretty obvious to the recipient), or something like a high profile wire fraud investigation throwing you in jail, or a major court decision to change that.
If someone receives an inbound ACH transfer, the guarantees are much, much lower, since the sender can just send a reverse transaction and get it back unless the bank stops them.
What do you mean by "wire info"? Both wire transfers and ACH payments are addressed by account number and routing number, which are the same for both transfer methods at almost all banks.
Whether your bank automatically honors ACH pull payments is a different matter, but given the above, I don't see how providing only your "wire info" would help with fraudulent ACH pulls.
> Also, if someone receives funds via wire, they can be 99.9%+ sure the funds are theirs and will stay there indefinitely.
If somebody hacks my bank account, I don't see how it would be that hard for them to initiate a fraudulent wire transfer. In fact, it's arguably the other way around: Many banks do not even allow their customers to initiate outbound ACH payments to third parties.
> If someone receives an inbound ACH transfer, the guarantees are much, much lower, since the sender can just send a reverse transaction and get it back unless the bank stops them.
I take it you haven't actually dealt with wires or this scenario with ACH much?
Most banks (by funds/size) use different wire routing numbers, and sometimes provide deposit only or different account numbers for wires (for high net worth accounts anyway).
Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and several others I can name off the top of my head. Only smaller operations don't usually.
Wires (inbound and outbound) have their own departments, and outbound wires require manual confirmation and validation with the account holder for all but a small set of whitelisted individual accounts. For commercial accounts, usually dual release consent (a minimum of two individual accounts with release privilege's must consent before a wire is sent), and/or verbal confirmation with a staffer on the team dealing with wires. If it's a verbal confirmation, they'll confirm all details of the destination, including account #'s and amounts + validate who the confirming party is and that they have appropriate spend authority.
That will often require something like sending corporate charter and the appropriate board consent documents over to the bank beforehand, for example. For larger amounts, expect in person validation.
Your link to the ACH rules there doesn't say what you think it says. It mostly covers attempts at backdating transactions, and 'egregious violations' - aka 500+ bad transactions or transactions adding up to $500K. None of those cover yanking back $50k over a 'dispute'.
Additionally, lawsuit concerns about ACH clawbacks like I described have been handled by adding 'You consent to reversal of transactions we consider done in error' or the like in their TOS or agreements, which covers almost all scenarios.
Really common uses are things like 'oops, we paid you too much - yoink!' in payroll, or 'oh, we didn't mean to actually send you that money just yet - yoink!' then company goes bankrupt, good luck getting your money this year. It used to be not uncommon for some random utility company to bill 10x the right amount from autopay and then spend months returning the money too.
Even more irritating, most banks (especially BofA) will have no problem throwing overdraft fees on your account while sending the money back too.
You can of course always sue the offending party, but that can take awhile, and they might be bankrupt (and no money left) or flat out impossible to find depending on how little they care about felony warrants.
Which, surprisingly, some people don’t seem to care about as much as you’d expect. And felony warrants are not nearly as effective in getting ahold of someone in a timely fashion as one would prefer.
> Most banks (by funds/size) use different wire routing numbers
These are public information you can find on the bank's website, i.e. that's an inconvenience for account holders, not a security feature. For my bank, they're also identical.
> and sometimes provide deposit only or different account numbers for wires
If they can do that, they can provide account numbers with ACH pull deactivated just as easily.
It seems like most of the ACH pain points, as well as wire transfer security features like two-party sign-off etc. you describe, revolve around bank policies, not the actual ACH or wire transfer rules.
Since wire transfers don’t allow externally initiated withdrawals (unlike ACH) and wire transfers can be initiated (and accepted) at accounts that cannot accept or initiate ACH transfers, that’s false.
I merely tried to point out that ACH push exists and is practically very similar to wire transfers (in that it's both reasonably final/irreversible, and that an account being set up to receive inbound ACH push/credit payments does not automatically need to honor incoming debit requests).
In any case, it seems like you are comfortable with your views about ACH and wire transfers and not really interested in at least entertaining the ideas I've tried to present, so I'll leave you to it.
ACH push is not reasonably final or irreversible. It’s trivially reversible, and I gave many examples of when it is actually reversed all the time in practice, which wires cannot be.
And I have yet to see an account which can take ACH credits but won’t take ACH debits, as ACH debits are the normal anyway.
Reversing ACH credits is not trivial, no matter how often you claim it! Or can you show me any bank or service provider that offers it as a "trivial" feature (i.e. not something to be used only in case of double bookings or similar)?
It‘s also only possible within five days after an incorrect credit, so if you‘re very concerned about that remote possibility, you can always just wait that long before you consider any incoming "untrusted" funds final.
And if you think that wires can‘t be reversed you should look into the concept of "hold harmless". The practical difference is that many banks automate ACH reversals, while wires need to be manually sent back. But if you think that you can e.g. just keep funds accidentally or fraudulently transferred to your account simply due to the way in which they are sent, you are mistaken.
> And I have yet to see an account which can take ACH credits but won’t take ACH debits
Then you just haven‘t looked. Googling for "ACH debit block" yields several business accounts that support this feature, including Chase.
Wire info can only be used to send money OUT. It's sender initiated. You can't initiate a debit of funds from someone's account using the mechanism.
So you can safely give someone wire information without having to worry about someone draining your account with it (and then have to deal with your bank's fraud department trying to claw it back).
Also, if someone receives funds via wire, they can be 99.9%+ sure the funds are theirs and will stay there indefinitely.
Reversing it would require either a major bank error (which happens, but is usually pretty obvious to the recipient), or something like a high profile wire fraud investigation throwing you in jail, or a major court decision to change that.
See [https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-laws...]
If someone receives an inbound ACH transfer, the guarantees are much, much lower, since the sender can just send a reverse transaction and get it back unless the bank stops them.
reply