A Thousand-Year Race to Move Money Safely Keeps Creating New Ways to Steal It

For roughly a thousand years, finance has tried to separate the movement of wealth from the physical risk of transporting it. Each time innovators remove one form of theft, a new one takes its place. 

Swift, the messaging network that still routes about $5 trillion a day across borders, is now facing that same pressure from blockchain-based rivals, decades after it replaced older systems built on trust and paper rather than code.

Medieval Traders Solved Robbery by Removing the Gold Entirely

In the 8th century, Islamic merchants moving goods between Baghdad, Cairo and the Indian subcontinent faced a straightforward danger: bandits targeting anyone transporting gold. Armed escorts could not fully solve the problem, so merchants built a network of brokers called hawaladars instead. 

A merchant handed cash to a hawaladar in one city, and a counterparty paid out the equivalent amount elsewhere, verified through trust and a code word rather than a coin crossing any border.

The suftaja followed, replacing the broker and code word with an encrypted paper message. By the 1200s, merchant houses in Florence and Venice were using letters of exchange to move fortunes across Europe the same way, again without physically transporting gold.

European Banking Innovations Traded Robbery Risk for Fraud and Bank Runs

Seventeenth-century London goldsmith bankers took the next step, issuing receipts for gold deposits that began circulating as paper money in their own right. 

That system worked until enough depositors demanded their gold back at once, producing what is considered one of the first bank runs and introducing a new category of financial risk that had nothing to do with physical theft.

The South Sea Bubble of 1720 pushed the pattern further. Investors bought shares in a company built on inflated claims rather than real assets, and speculation and fraud replaced the threat of robbery as the dominant danger. 

By the early 1800s, central banks and correspondent banking arrangements let banks settle debts with each other through shared accounts, which solved earlier problems but created a new one: the failure of one bank could now drag down others it was tied to through those accounts.

The American Frontier Sent Money Transport Backward Into the Age of Stagecoach Robbers

American westward expansion undid centuries of that progress. Settlers moving into territory with few banks had to move money physically again, and the bandits returned with it. 

Wells Fargo and other operators tried to protect stagecoach shipments with armed guards, but records show Wells Fargo stagecoaches were robbed nearly 350 times between 1870 and 1884, with 129 more holdups in Arizona between 1875 and 1903. 

Jesse James derailed a train in Iowa in 1873 to reach its cash shipment, and Butch Cassidy blew open an express car in Wyoming in 1899.

The physical risk only receded once money stopped moving as cash and began moving as a telegraph message in the second half of the 19th century, removing the need for armed escorts entirely.

Cash Remittances Still Carry Physical Risk for Millions of Migrants Today

That physical risk never fully disappeared. The World Bank estimates roughly 3 billion people worldwide still use cash. Ricardo Salinas, whose Mexico City-based Grupo Elektra has operated in remittances for nearly 30 years, said the company pays out $500 million in peso bills every week through its retail stores, accounting for roughly half of all U.S.-to-Mexico remittance volume. According to Salinas: 

“In Mexico, 80% of all remittances are cash payout. It’s the format senders and recipients prefer.”

Migrants sending or collecting that cash are frequently targeted by criminals on the way to transfer offices or immediately after picking up payouts, according to United Nations research on migrant smuggling and exploitation. 

The danger the hawaladars eliminated for 8th-century merchants never fully left the remittance corridors serving some of today’s most vulnerable senders.

Swift Built a Global Messaging Network, But Fraud Found a Way Around It

Swift went live in 1977 with 518 banks across 22 countries and grew to roughly 11,500 institutions across 200 countries within three decades. Jack Pouderoyen, Swift’s head of digital asset strategy, said the network now carries enormous volume relative to global output. Pouderoyen said: 

“The equivalent of the world’s GDP flows over our network every two to three days.” 

Even so, a typical Swift transfer still costs between 1% and 4% and takes one to five business days to settle. 

Swift’s messaging system itself has not been directly breached at scale, but attackers have found ways around it. In the 2016 Bangladesh Bank heist, criminals used compromised bank systems to send fraudulent but authentic-looking Swift messages, stealing $81 million; Swift has stated the attack occurred outside its own network. 

Facing years of pressure from stablecoins and blockchain-based transfer systems, sometimes described in industry commentary since 2017 as potential “Swift killers,” the organization unveiled a blockchain ledger last month. Shortly after, HSBC and Standard Chartered used it to settle a transaction in seconds rather than days.

Blockchain Removed More Friction, and Cybercriminals Followed the Money There Too

Blockchain-based transfers cut costs and settlement times further, but they created their own attack surface. 

Social engineering scams targeting crypto users and projects have been rising, according to Chainalysis data. The 2025 Bybit hack combined both approaches, starting with social engineering before escalating into a technical exploit. 

Chainalysis estimates North Korea-linked hackers stole roughly $2 billion in crypto last year, including an estimated $1.5 billion from Bybit alone.

Stablecoins, tokens pegged to fiat currencies and increasingly used for cross-border transfers, could grow into a $3.7 trillion market by 2030, according to BNY forecasts. Citi projects the tokenized securities market, another emerging channel for moving value across borders, will reach $5.5 trillion in the same timeframe. 

Neither forecast eliminates the underlying pattern: each new way of moving money faster has, so far, opened a new way to take it.