Stop a wire transfer
Page Article
Sometimes a payment needs to be stopped. For example: in case of fraud, or when a duplicate payment has been erroneously sent. Criminals launder billions of dollars overseas through financial fraud schemes like wire transfer fraud, corporate account takeovers, business e-mail compromise scams and other financially motivated crimes. Detecting that you sent money to the wrong account within 24 hours is the best chance of recovering your money.
What to do immediately: Call your financial institution and ask to issue a recall notice for your wire.
Large international wire transfers
For international wire transfers over $50,000, call your regional FBI office (
https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices) and local police. The FBI offers a Financial Fraud Kill Chain (FFKC) process to help recover large international wire transfers stolen from the United States. The FFKC is intended to be utilized as another potential avenue for U.S. financial institutions to get victim funds returned. Any wire transfers that occur outside of these thresholds should still be reported to law enforcement (
http://www.ic3.gov/) but the FFKC cannot be utilized to return the fraudulent funds.
The FFKC can only be implemented if the fraudulent wire transfer meets the following criteria:
- the wire transfer is $50,000 or above.
- the wire transfer is international.
- a SWIFT recall notice has been initiated by your financial institution.
- the wire transfer has occurred within the last 72 hours.
If this criteria is met, the following information will be needed:
- Summary of the incident
- Name of victim
- Location of victim (City and state)
- Originating bank / credit union name
- Originating bank / credit union account number
- Beneficiary name
- Beneficiary bank / credit union
- Beneficiary account number
- Beneficiary bank / credit union location (if known)
- Intermediary bank / credit union name (if known)
- SWIFT number
- Date
- Amount of transaction
- Any additional information that may be available, such as "for further credit," or “in favor of”