And besides, big banks still have to deal with checksum-passing iban typos on a daily basis. IBANs only have two check digits.
Actually the checksum was designed especially to deal with typos. As such, dealing with typo errors is usually not an issue at all.
What they do have to deal with is maliciously created IBANs though. However, if the account an IBAN should point at doesn't exist then the transaction usually just bounces.
That's the thing - they can deal with it. There are fallbacks.
In crypto, your money is just instantly destroyed.
They’ll ask the other bank if they’d like to return the money, and that bank will maybe ask the recipient if they’d like to return the money.
The recipient doesn’t want to return the money? You’re SOL. You can go to court, but they can trivially evade civil action by transferring the money overseas.
You can certainly pursue the matter in civil courts, but law enforcement does not like to touch this kind of stuff at all. If the recipient transfers the money overseas, you will most likely never be able to recover it.
As a result, if I received a large amount of money that I coulnd't explain, I would contact the sender or the bank first. I can't just spend it immeditaly and claim that I had no idea.
You can go to court and get a judgement against someone with no assets to collect. In the end you’ll just have lost even more money.
[1] https://www.betaalvereniging.nl/betaalproducten-en-diensten/...
