Is your money at risk with a wire transfer? Here’s what you need to know

It's unclear how often wire transfers go sour, but they rank among the top five bank product complaints at the Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments.

When Alexander Nachaj needed to wire the down payment on a house, he didn’t worry much about it– he just headed down to his local bank branch to send it along to the notary.

As he tells it, Nachaj made sure to ask the teller at the TD Bank branch to check the numbers twice, since he’d been required to sign a form releasing them from any liability over the $18,000 down payment. The teller then sent along the money.

And then it disappeared.

So began the Saint-Hyacinthe, Que.-based man’s odyssey into Canada’s wire transfer system. The vast majority of the time it successfully sends money securely and accurately, but as Nachaj discovered, it is far from foolproof.

What exactly went wrong in Nachaj’s case isn’t clear, as TD declined to discuss the specifics of the case, but he says he was left without answers for many weeks about where the money had gone.

“It’s mind-boggling that in this day and age, a transfer can just disappear into thin air for so long without anyone taking responsibility, or even being able to know what happened,” he said.

In the meantime Nachaj was faced with losing out on his house in a hot market, so he had to cobble together another down payment with help from family, then send that money along by wire too.

“That was like walking across a tightrope or something, that was the scariest thing I think I’ve ever had to stand, because what if it happened again?”