In the movies - Do wire transfers really work?
In a lot of the movies the bad guys seem to prefer wire transfers as their payment method of choice. In the recent movie Non-Stop, the terrorist provides a bank account number and demands a payment of $150 million US dollars.
I am a loss to see how this works. If someone transfers money to an account here in the UK the sender can always ask for a refund or return by filing a fraud claim; the person receiving the money cannot simply just cash and withdraw, especially if the transfer is a large amount of money.
So are there actual bank accounts where you can dump loads of money and no one can ask or question refunds?
Best Answer
Some Banks fall under the jurisdiction of certain authorities: it's safe to say criminals would not choose those banks, instead opening an account with a specialized authority.
Typically, the Banks being used by the Villain are institutions that will not co-operate with authorities: the most popular deployed being the Cayman Islands and Switzerland. These locations operate under Bank Secrecy laws which remove them from the jurisdiction of international authorities. They are legally protected from handing over this information.
Swiss Banking in particular is notorious for accommodating illicit funds, dating back to the middle ages but more famously the bank UBS for continuing to hide ill-gotten Nazi Gold on behalf of the descendants of Nazi Officers...
... if Nazi Gold has remained in its vaults after all this time, immune from obligations of reparation anything can remain in such bank accounts.
Movies produced in the next few years that use 'Swiss Banks' for secrecy will be goof-guilty however, as new laws currently being ratified and introduced in the EU are about to remove the privilege such banks enjoy in Europe.
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Answer 2
Are you sure you can "refund or return by filing a fraud claim" when doing a bank to bank transfer? I think the refund thing is only available when using a credit card.
Here is a real-life example from Denmark: A danish company paid my company with a bank transfer, but they used the wrong bank account as target. And that company never got its money back. It was gone.
So I don't think it is impossible that once the money has been transferred to a different bank the money can't be taken back by the source bank.
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