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Many many years ago when I immigrated to the United States, I opened my first checking account. After some time I found a strange receipt of $17 thousand, which I did not expect from anyone.
Back then the internet was still dial-up and everyone had Nokia 3310 mobile phones. In those days some didn’t even have a cell phone. Pagers were popular. The only bank accounts were checking accounts, and the statements were sent by mail or handed out at a bank branch.
On that day, I took the bank statement and took it to my friend who is a financial adviser. After opening the envelope and seeing the statement, he asked me “where did this money come from?” I replied that they were probably credited by mistake. I said that I was going to go to the bank and report the erroneous credit and return the money.
My friend shouted at me that in no case should this be done. Since, according to American law, I did not steal this money, it is their mistake, and I received it legally. I can freely withdraw this money from the bank with special covered checks, called Money Orders and nothing threatens me for that. And the bank itself will reimburse the sender for these erroneously sent funds. I objected that this is not fair, and I am not going to start my life in the States with such a sudden enrichment at someone else's expense.
I arrived at the bank and said that this money was not mine, it was credited by mistake and must be returned back to the sender. Then I was invited to the vice president's office, where he shook my hand and gave me a small but pleasant reward for honesty.
To this day I'm still a client of that bank.
But I’m not telling this to brag. Here is the thing:
The other day, the well-known cryptocurrency lending platform BlockFi sent referral bonuses to a group of its clients and the operator accidentally sent bitcoins to some instead of the internal stablecoin of the GUSD platform. Clients found up to 700 BTC on their BlockFi accounts.
A little later, the management of the platform became aware of this misunderstanding and the service blocked these bitcoins on their accounts. However, many managed to withdraw BTC to their cold wallets. The company acknowledged the fact of losing part of the funds on Twitter, but reported that most of its customers voluntarily returned bitcoins.
Other clients of the service were frightened by this incident and they began to urgently withdraw the crypt from their BlockFi accounts. It never occurred to these alarmists that most of the clients agreed to voluntarily return the bitcoins to the company. But unfortunately, not all were returned. BlockFi admitted on Twitter that $10 million still remains in the wallets of customers who managed to withdraw bitcoins and have not yet returned.
Moreover, the company sent out threats to even those clients who were not going to withdraw free bitcoins from their accounts, but withdrew their own USDT, brought there before the incident.
See the difference?
Lack of proper accounting and compliance procedues can very easily lead to bankruptcy. Many clients have already left the platform and will never return there. You need to reward customers for their honesty and not call them scammers and scare them with courts.
