This is impossible to solve, in the cryptocurrency space or in the existing structures we have. When you send an email, you cannot know if someone actually has access to that account (maybe they forgot their password?), you can only know if the address is valid or not (by sending the email). Similarly, you don't know if the right person has access to the bank account you're sending funds to, unless you ask the person who is supposed to have access, if they actually can access it.

You can NEVER send a bank account transfer to a UNASSIGNED IBAN, the bank will just reject it after some days.

If you sent a IBAN transfer someone will get the money. You transfer to someone else that gets the money and you could try to go to court.

The money just doesn’t disappear like in crypto.

The e-mail is a great example, the e-mail can be lost, thats why no bank ever made transfer over email! You loose the e-mail text, not 500.000$!

Since this has already been answered multiple times in this submission already, I'll leave you with this:

> You know what happens when you send Ether to a incorrect Ethereum address? The wallet will reject sending it. If you bypass the wallet and rewrite your own wallet to send it anyways, the validators reading from the mempool will reject it. If you rewrite your own validator to accept it anyways, no other validator will accept it and the transfer will never go through.

> What happened here is more like you used IBAN to send to the correct account, the correct bank and everything was correct, but no one actually has access to the account but the bank doesn't know this.

> This is impossible to solve,

Let's talk about putting safety rails around large drops.

They should never be necessary with careful use.

And they can't prevent everyone from falling to their death.

But they still prevent some harms, so we generally require them to be present.

Design to do everything with contracts through methods instead of transfers to contract addresses would make this particular type of failure impossible. There would still be other ways to screw up and lose money on accident, of course. But any way that can be reasonably eliminated and isn't, is a design flaw.

SMTP servers are able to reply whether a user exists, and some still do. Your own server will send you a "undeliverable" message if it receives a negative reply.

Yes, but that's different. That checks if the user exists, not if the person behind the user actually has access to that user.