Has Anyone Dealt With a Wire Transfer Mistake?

We’re in the process of closing on a home and consolidating our funds for the down payment. My wife accidentally sent $50,000 to the wrong account while transferring funds from our credit union to USAA. She confused our USAA member number with our account number. She realized it quickly and contacted both the credit union and USAA, and at first, USAA said the money hadn’t been deposited yet. A few days later, USAA said the funds were sent to someone else’s account. They also mentioned that due to federal law, they don’t have to return the money. Is there anything we can do to get our funds back? I’m baffled that our member number is the same as someone’s account number. Any advice would be appreciated.

Next time, try linking your USAA accounts directly with your CU. This way, you can transfer funds without manually entering account numbers.

Vincent said:
Next time, try linking your USAA accounts directly with your CU. This way, you can transfer funds without manually entering account numbers.

Just keep in mind that there are limits. USAA can only transfer up to $5000/day or $25000/month if they originate the transaction. My CU has the same daily limit but no monthly limit if the transfer starts on their side. Transfers are typically completed within one business day.

We got the money back! It’s such a relief. After my wife spoke to someone higher up at USAA, they were able to clarify the necessary steps to our credit union, and they made the adjustment to redirect the funds. All’s well that ends well!

Wow, that’s a nightmare. You should talk to your credit union about reversing the transfer. I don’t see how USAA is responsible for fixing this.

Devlin said:
Wow, that’s a nightmare. You should talk to your credit union about reversing the transfer. I don’t see how USAA is responsible for fixing this.

We worked with our credit union right after we found out. The situation finally got resolved after someone senior at USAA stepped in. They made the credit union send an amendment to change the destination account instead of doing a full reversal themselves. USAA said they’d have the funds moved to our account by the end of the week. It’s an embarrassing mistake on our part, but I was shocked that our USAA member number was identical to someone else’s account number. I thought USAA would have a different system to avoid this kind of confusion.

@Bailey
Yeah, you’d think they’d use different numbers. But who knows how it works behind the scenes.