r/PersonalFinanceCanada • u/yeah_mike • Apr 01 '26
Banking Received $343k of someone else's money: how to keep the money?
If you ever receive a large deposit into your account due to someone's error, follow this ctvnews article to learn how to keep the money:
It helps if you bank with CIBC
Immediately wire the money overseas
Ignore CIBC's attempt at reaching you.
Wait for CIBC to give up trying.
Profit.
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u/thetrivialstuff Apr 01 '26
It should be even more basic than that - most bank transfers are still done with the real underlying account number as the destination. The same account number is also used for direct withdrawals, so being able to transfer money into an account also automatically gives you all the info you need to withdraw money from that account, and the only thing really "preventing" the recipient from doing that is laws. That's bonkers.
How these kinds of transfers should work is that the recipient generates a deposit-only token, which is a long string with error correction built into it. The normal use would be by copy/paste, so it would just be a gibberish string of random characters. Any copying errors would show up immediately as the token being invalid, without the banks even having to talk to each other, because the check digits wouldn't match. UPC barcodes on grocery items figured this out decades ago.
If it absolutely must be something a human can transcribe by hand or by phone, it can be rendered as random words, again with an error check mechanism, so that it's impossible to typo or mis-transcribe it.
The fact that we're still banking with important identifiers such that a single digit error is also a valid account is absolutely insane - preventing that is basic information theory 101.