> Though they weren’t gracious enough to let the person withdraw their funds in the end
You know this is a crime, right? I mean, everyone's international and anonymous so it has the same relationship to law enforcement as a backstreet dice game, but they did actually defraud this guy.
>What makes you think the bank account's details you have that the (presumably) stolen funds were sent to are those of the actual criminal? //
Did he say that? I thought he was just saying as he had the account number then the bank could easily stop that money; the implication being that someone trying to retrieve the money could be traced.
> Have all of the people scammed been brought whole?
I know zero details on where exactly the money ended up, but I have to imagine someone dumb enough to try and pull this off would have also effectively shredded a huge chunk of the stolen funds.
What I don't understand is... where the hell are the police on this stuff? Checking account fraud is ridiculously easy to pull off - if you know an account number, you can steal an arbitrary amount of money from a checking account. Why isn't it more common? Because the U.S. treasury department comes down like the wrath of God on people they catch doing it. Of course scammers are trying to set up scams and take advantage of people in various clever ways. We're _supposed_ to have police who make things very, very unpleasant for the people who do so, but as far as I can tell, they don't even care.
> "I stole your money and several other people's money and then put it into a bank account. Tough luck! It's too late, you are unlikely to prove which of the dollar bills in account are yours!"
>That person just lost $12k to fraud and has no recourse at all.
The original person lost $12k by a mistake of their own, namely sending it to the wrong place. I wouldn't call that fraud. That this money is then in a weird unintended limbo and can be picked up by anyone who noticed, and someone tried to whitehat get it and give it back, and they failed, does still not make it fraud IMO.
>If a stranger in another country steals $500 from me I'm going to have a really hard time doing anything about it. And knowing their wallet doesn't mean I know who they actually are, as those aren't tied to an identity.
So how is this different from Cash? Except you actually have an idea of where the money is going and can track it, e.g. if it goes to a CEX. This is way better than cash.
> But the guy in question here did something really dumb, was very lucky, and should stfu.
What did he do wrong? He already had permission from Chase:
> But because this was a bank I wanted to get their explicit permission before researching any further
> Once I had permission quickly made a proof of concept
So I would be surprised if they would be able to make the criminal charges stick.
> It is an immense failure of law enforcement to not crack down harder on widespread scams.
I fully agree. My identity was stolen and used to sign up for retail credit cards in a spree, and I even did the research for them. I had a timestamp of purchase, the items purchased, and the cash register number. The police could not care less. For one, they are lazy as hell and throw up jurisdictions as an excuse. The mere fact that the thief seemingly only used one store per jurisdiction seemed almost intentional in terms of taking advantage of this. The total amount stolen was $9,000, but I don't think the police gave it a second thought after I contacted them, and this was in a city big enough that had a financial crimes department.
>TBF, is there any way to do fraud protection on personal transfers ? Imagine you sent 100 bucks to your cousin and 10 min later requested your bank to get your money back because you sent it to the wrong cousin.
When it's easily verifiable that actual fraud has taken place I would say yes. It would've taken them literally 5 minutes of their time to investigate by going to the website, seeing it presents itself as a retail furniture store, and to go through the checkout process and seeing that it ends up at a form for a personal transfer, and that no goods ever end up being delivered, all of which clearly indicate the transaction is 100% intended to be fraudulent by the supposed seller.
The guy was caught in short order so he really wasn't able to do it. You can steal money pretty easily in the traditional financial system with a simple forged check. Money will likely go through initially but you also will likely be caught in short order.
You know this is a crime, right? I mean, everyone's international and anonymous so it has the same relationship to law enforcement as a backstreet dice game, but they did actually defraud this guy.
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