I am a person who wired ~15K to wrong bank account outside US, I only realized after got notification that money was not received it was days later, reversing wire was straight forward and took if not mistaken a week to process, while requesting to reverse transaction branch manager warned me that on another end bank might refuse to reverse transaction and then this money would be lost forever.

That's a pretty good outcome.

I've found that when I wire a large amount of money to a new account, humans sanity check the transaction at both banks.

Also, I once did something weird (wire to same escrow firm a few days apart), and got a call of the form "What's going on? Did you buy two houses or something?"

You were lucky, I’ve heard similar stories where the money ended up lost (good faith deposit for a mortgage wired to fraudster).

Reminds me of [0] but this time it is by the bank itself accidentally depositing into rival bank accounts.

Oh dear.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59826345

That isn't true in my experience at a, "lot of money" scale. They will help you set up the transaction, confirm the receiving party, test and prove the transfer, execute it.

There are also courts etc to get involved, if someone sends you a million dollar wire and you keep it (for no services rendered), courts generally don't let you just have it (cross border caveats etc).

Courts can also get involved in the BTC case too - it’s just an expensive and slow option in both cases (with uncertain outcomes).

Assuming you can actually track down who owns the wallet.. banks know who is responsible for each account.

They also might be able to help if you were conned into sending the money. The money might be freezable.

Yeah, the similarity there was more of my point. Wire Fraud theft often happens by scammers that have hacked title companies and send emails with fraudulent account numbers to people expecting them.

Frankly banks also rarely help people scammed via other means (Venmo, Apple Pay, Zelle, etc.)