There 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.
If 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.
She 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.
Does 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.
They 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.
Australians 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.
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.
How 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?
Convert 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.
Of course not. What are you implying? I have great affinity for the legs of snitches. They're very nice legs, and I certainly wouldn't want to see anything to happen to them.
You still owe the money back at that point; it converts into a debt, that can be further converted into a lien on your assets. (Also, I think you missed the part where this story is about fiat money, not crypto.)
The point of the insurance step is, effectively, “doubling your money”, so that you can give half of it back, and not be in debt.
Place the funds back into a crypto.com account, transfer the funds through a tumbler into a wallet you control.
Open support ticket with crypto.com saying you've been phished and that the funds are gone. Make sure to capture in writing their response that funds cannot be recovered.
Wait for them to try to recover funds. Forward them their own email and explain that you did return the funds but then they were lost and can't be recovered.
The scheme is highly amusing, the problem being that you still have to launder the money. Sure, the keys to the new wallet are available, but how to explain later how the money was earned in the first place (and why no taxes paid then)?
I got the joke. AFAIK, all comments on this were jokes (turning crypto's no chargeback mechanism on its holders; super-complicated movie-like scheme; mine was doing what the lady in the article already did). I was hoping someone had a joke to 'deal' with the tax office.
Tumblers are trusted and are commonly not providing sufficient protection to hide links from a state-level actor. Practically nobody who knows what they're doing would be using a typical tumbler service, for multiple reasons. The field has moved significantly since they would be used for something like this.
I definitely don't know what I'm doing and don't claim to. Wasn't a serious recommendation and hopefully not a serious question either.
I don't think you'd need to defend yourself against a state level actor here. 10M gone missing from a crypto exchange isn't exactly a national security event. In the crypto world I think that's just called Tuesday.
Buy a friend's mansion using very inflated valuation. When the judge orders you to sell in order to paid Crypto.com back, sell for true value. Enter bankruptcy (since you cannot afford the difference) and discharge your debt. Friend later gives you half.
It's fun to think about. I think it would be hard to make the most of the money and have a great lifestyle while keeping a low profile and not getting caught.
It costs a lot less than $10M if you want to move to Thailand and live off-grid in some remote area. You can probably do that for a lot less than $100,000, including a Thailand Elite Visa. If that's part of your plan, then just hold onto the money and earn interest, or maybe give it back and hope for a reward. Or just save up the money normally, it's not that much.
I wonder if it's still possible to change your identity in a developed country. Maybe you could move to a new country and start using a fake passport to establish your new identity over time. But I think that stopped being possible sometime in the 90s or early 2000s.
I found it stressful enough just to move to a new country and get a visa legally. I can't imagine also worrying about getting extradited and sent to prison at any moment. Sounds like a terrible life. I wouldn't keep the money.
EDIT: Just reading some of the other replies, and wow, there are some genius criminals in here. Maybe I would take the money!
Did 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.
They 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...
In 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.
If $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.
Depends 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
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.
Surely there should be a statute of limitations on that. The idea that someone could demand money from me for a mistake they made seven months ago sounds ridiculous, no matter how big the mistake.
The statute of limitations appears to be 6 years [1]. I wonder if anyone has been unjustly enriched and then forced to pay back at the 5 year mark? Would be an interesting case.
When the mistake in question is a sum of money orders of magnitude bigger than what you make in a year, demanding it back in 7 months sounds like the only reasonable thing to do. Especially if it's very clear that you knew it was a mistake, made no honest effort to notify them, and proceeded to spend all of it as fast as you could.
> there should be a statute of limitations on that. The idea that someone could demand money from me for a mistake they made seven months ago sounds ridiculous
It's six years in the UK.
This is why you should retain six years of bank statements...... and a 'bank error in your favour'? You had better wait six years before you spend the dosh.
[Though to be pedantic, in law you still owe the money, just that after six years without any attempt to reclaim it, the debt becomes legally unenforceable]
>Surely there is ground for "the mistake is yours, the money is gone" approach
not really. Pretty much every jurisdiction has laws regarding transaction errors, you can't just go blow a couple of millions just because someone made faulty transaction. If you notice random amounts of money in your account, don't go out and spend it.
Australian law has the concept of "unjust enrichment". If you receive a payment that is mistaken you have a prima facie obligation to make restitution.
no 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.
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? 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.
> 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?
Technically grandparent comment is not wrong: it's an ability to revert, via courts. Meanwhile (some) crypto-bros scream "With cryptocurrencies, we'll no longer have intervening governments or courts, that'll be utopia!"...
> 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.
Wife 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.
> Wife 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.
I'm not saying it's not possible in more professional settings; I honestly think Exchanges are the weakest link in the BTC ecosystem since it wasn't devised with such a system, but has found it's way there anyway, as it was meant to be p2p. What I am saying is that it's complete amateur hour, and even those you'd think have better compliance and stricter governance with YC and other VC backing would be better off, would fare better but CONbase is being sued for a myriad of reasons including stock price manipulation. Hopefully it finally takes it out and we can move on from all the baggage that that corpse has had in the ecosystem once and for all.
Essentially, I don't think BTC exchanges are useful for anything but training wheels, the whole point of this system was to introduce decentralized forms of transacting value over the internet n the modern WOrld, and whether it was Bitcoinica, MTGOX, BTC-E, CONbase and all the alt exchange hacks etc... they all end up being so poorly managed that they distract people from the true innovation that is happening--especially during the bear markets.
So far I only endorse and use CASH, simply because Dorsey has made it clear he doesn't want to be an exchange and instead offers on-boarding in the most legally complaint way--that requires a litany of lawyers he can leverage from Square who have already been through the process of expanding into new markets and costs more in fees but CASH has been doing so much that I consider it a fair-trade type of relationship.
But people refuse to see that BTC's strength isn't in trying to recreate the fiat World and merge and shoe-horn wall street into it (ICO, DeFi, and yield farming scams) it's in being able to have monetary-propety sovereignty in a World with less of it as laws are encroaching not just money but private property itself.
What 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.
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.
88 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadIf 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.
The story or the government had holes in au
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.
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.
if experience in similar US market has taught anything.
Asking for a friend.
[1] https://www.abnamro.nl/nl/prive/rente/negatieve-rente.html
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.
Or something to that extent.
or just say you lost your private key.
The point of the insurance step is, effectively, “doubling your money”, so that you can give half of it back, and not be in debt.
company gone, no entity to pursue the lawsuit.
Open support ticket with crypto.com saying you've been phished and that the funds are gone. Make sure to capture in writing their response that funds cannot be recovered.
Wait for them to try to recover funds. Forward them their own email and explain that you did return the funds but then they were lost and can't be recovered.
I don't think you'd need to defend yourself against a state level actor here. 10M gone missing from a crypto exchange isn't exactly a national security event. In the crypto world I think that's just called Tuesday.
It costs a lot less than $10M if you want to move to Thailand and live off-grid in some remote area. You can probably do that for a lot less than $100,000, including a Thailand Elite Visa. If that's part of your plan, then just hold onto the money and earn interest, or maybe give it back and hope for a reward. Or just save up the money normally, it's not that much.
I wonder if it's still possible to change your identity in a developed country. Maybe you could move to a new country and start using a fake passport to establish your new identity over time. But I think that stopped being possible sometime in the 90s or early 2000s.
I found it stressful enough just to move to a new country and get a visa legally. I can't imagine also worrying about getting extradited and sent to prison at any moment. Sounds like a terrible life. I wouldn't keep the money.
EDIT: Just reading some of the other replies, and wow, there are some genius criminals in here. Maybe I would take the money!
They mastered victim-blaming.
- log to your crypto.scam account from 'behind 7 proxies' using free wifi
- transfer funds to some crypto mixer, then multiple private wallets
- delete account or change password
- zero fill storage, throw away laptop
- few days later report losing access to your crypto.scam assets
- wait couple of years
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...
9 months is well within the regular window too. Would be different if it showed up 10 years later.
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.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09615768.2022.2...
It's six years in the UK.
This is why you should retain six years of bank statements...... and a 'bank error in your favour'? You had better wait six years before you spend the dosh.
[Though to be pedantic, in law you still owe the money, just that after six years without any attempt to reclaim it, the debt becomes legally unenforceable]
not really. Pretty much every jurisdiction has laws regarding transaction errors, you can't just go blow a couple of millions just because someone made faulty transaction. If you notice random amounts of money in your account, don't go out and spend it.
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.
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.
The crypto crowd sure like regulations at the most unexpected times.
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.
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/20/cryptocom-says-...
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?
What’s different? Have talked to a few lawyers about this and still am unclear.
This is being handled by the courts.
Please read the article before commenting.
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.
I'm not saying it's not possible in more professional settings; I honestly think Exchanges are the weakest link in the BTC ecosystem since it wasn't devised with such a system, but has found it's way there anyway, as it was meant to be p2p. What I am saying is that it's complete amateur hour, and even those you'd think have better compliance and stricter governance with YC and other VC backing would be better off, would fare better but CONbase is being sued for a myriad of reasons including stock price manipulation. Hopefully it finally takes it out and we can move on from all the baggage that that corpse has had in the ecosystem once and for all.
Essentially, I don't think BTC exchanges are useful for anything but training wheels, the whole point of this system was to introduce decentralized forms of transacting value over the internet n the modern WOrld, and whether it was Bitcoinica, MTGOX, BTC-E, CONbase and all the alt exchange hacks etc... they all end up being so poorly managed that they distract people from the true innovation that is happening--especially during the bear markets.
So far I only endorse and use CASH, simply because Dorsey has made it clear he doesn't want to be an exchange and instead offers on-boarding in the most legally complaint way--that requires a litany of lawyers he can leverage from Square who have already been through the process of expanding into new markets and costs more in fees but CASH has been doing so much that I consider it a fair-trade type of relationship.
But people refuse to see that BTC's strength isn't in trying to recreate the fiat World and merge and shoe-horn wall street into it (ICO, DeFi, and yield farming scams) it's in being able to have monetary-propety sovereignty in a World with less of it as laws are encroaching not just money but private property itself.
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.