Originally published at: Crypto.com fighting to get $10.5M mistaken refund back | Boing Boing
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Crypto.com being a shitty company doing shitty things doesn’t give people the automatic right to steal.
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Fortune Favors the Brave
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Milton Bradley trained us all to just go with it. Did you ever politely refuse to collect that $200 as a kid?
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I’d sooner entrust my money to a trading card exchange than to crypto-bros … wait, what’s that you’re telling me?
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That was from a time when Bank Errors (to a limit) had to be paid out legally. They changed that law, a long, long time ago. I think it’d be funny if people tracked that in Monopoly, and then if someone ever rolled double 5’s (or some other trigger), people who took the bank error had to pay back the $200 + $10 for every turn they took since
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So, Crypto-dot-com, you like apples. . . ?
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Can you provide a citation for that claim?
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No, but when crooks steal from crooks, it doesn’t generate a lot of sympathy, either.
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It doesn’t, although this goes beyond that. According to the closest to a professed ethos of the crypto community, if the transfer is validated on the blockchain it is by definition correct and should be immutable and out of the control of any third party including government regulators. They are absolutely hypocrites for trying to avoid banking and financial regulations including consumer protection ones but then insisting that courts protect them from consumers and their own mistakes. Can we at least get them to advertise “Code is not law. We are a (uninsured) bank” if they want property law to be enforced on their behalf?
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This is why UX Designers exist.
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It would also be in their best interests if the standards and practices of their company was regulated by people in their employ with knowledge of math and finances. If ANY business gave a refund of similar magnitude, people would say the same thing, but people whose day job is theoretically all about math and money should certainly know better. I am reminded of Steve Martin’s reflections on why we don’t put all of our money into “Fred’s Bank”.
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Sure. In the US, it falls under terms and conditions of the bank account agreement, which is enforcable law as of 1978 in the Electronic Funds Transfer Act, 15 U.S. Code Subchapter VI - ELECTRONIC FUND TRANSFERS | U.S. Code | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute , under the error resolution sections and others.
There are also other laws that come into play if your bank is FDIC insured, or if your credit union is secured with a federally recognized bond (such as the NCUA’s insurance) , etc. But basically, it says that violating the terms of your account is a crime. Further, there’s “found money” laws on the book almost everywhere now that state you must make an effort to return money you know isn’t yours before you can keep it.
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Interesting twist per an article in ARS Technica:
Who is going to want to click on a possibly sketchy link when being served a legal notice?
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Yup. For that amount of money there should have been at least a second and probably third person validating it.
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And it took seven months for the company to notice the $10.5M mistake. More than enough time to buy a house. Doesn’t inspire confidence that they’re following good accounting practices.
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Look, everybody can go back and forth about this forever, but I think we can all agree that the big point here is that a person was in a commercial. That person was Matt. Damon.
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Sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant do you have a citation for it ever having been legal to keep money sent to you by the bank in error.
Keep in mind that crypto. com is not a bank. 
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