It is happening. Not once, or twice, but many times. Who didn't make at least one wrong bank transfer to somebody who didn't need to receive it?
Indeed, everyone could have this kind of issue.
But what about transferring almost 1 billion $ by mistake?!!
Well, this must be painful. For all, except the ones who received it, of course :).
This happened to Citibank and a trial followed, but the first sentence is in the favor of the receivers.
The bank acted as a loan agent for Revlon, the makeup producer, and it should pay 8 million $ as interest for the company's lenders. Well, by mistake, we still don't know why, instead of paying the interests only, the Citibank staff transferred all the debt.
So, almost 900 million $ were wired and only a part of the receivers agreed to give it back. More than 500 million $ remained uncovered.
Why? You can ask. It is a bank transfer, not like in crypto, when if you sent some coins, that's it, an irreversible way (of course, excepting XRP and some other coins/tokens where is possible because of large centralization).
Because in New York state, it seems that it is an exception from the rule of punishing people who is spending the money accidentally landed in their pockets - "discharge-for-value-defense".
So, if you are a lender for somebody and he pay you the whole amount of the debt, even is sooner than the maturity of the credit, you are entitled to keep the whole amount if you didn't know they were sent to you by accident.
"If the beneficiary is entitled to the money and did not know it was accidentally wired, they can keep it. Revlon lenders said they believed Citibank was wiring prepayments for a loan. After all, the money accidentally wired was the exact amount "to the penny" Citibank owed them, although the loan wasn't set to mature for quite some time."
What can we learn from this?
Be careful what you do, measure twice, double twice and cut one single time, because the cut is the most important part, because it is (almost) irreversible.
Anyway, I'd like to have the option in crypto (for a small fee, of course) to make a final confirmation of the payment before is getting into the receiver's address.
If you know there is already a way to do it, let me know.
In this way, we could still have a chance to avoid many sufferings in this world.
Looking like a happy couple, still with jobs and a home, not without money because of a mistake.
Take care. Cheers!
