You know what happens when you transfer money to a non-existent/incorrect IBAN?
Most likely your bank will reject the transaction and not even defund your account - as you mentioned, the IBAN itself is already designed to prevent human error.
If by chance you “crafted” a technically MOD-97 valid but not existing IBAN and the money goes out to the other bank (PACS.008), the other bank cannot book it (as the account doesn’t exist) and should automatically return it to you (PACS.004).
If by chance the other bank is incompliant and does not return the money, you can have your bank send a recall message (CAMT.056) to try and retrieve the funds. The other bank is then compelled to either refund the money (PACS.004 again) or at the least officially communicate they’re keeping your money (CAMT.029).
At that point, there’s still law and legal avenues to pursue.
One thing that does not and can not happen though, is for the money to vanish into a black hole and be removed from the economy. That is what a stable, standardized and reasonably regulated industry with some centralization does for you.
You know what happens when you send Ether to a incorrect Ethereum address? The wallet will reject sending it. If you bypass the wallet and rewrite your own wallet to send it anyways, the validators reading from the mempool will reject it. If you rewrite your own validator to accept it anyways, no other validator will accept it and the transfer will never go through.
What happened here is more like you used IBAN to send to the correct account, the correct bank and everything was correct, but no one actually has access to the account but the bank doesn't know this.
Most likely your bank will reject the transaction and not even defund your account - as you mentioned, the IBAN itself is already designed to prevent human error.
If by chance you “crafted” a technically MOD-97 valid but not existing IBAN and the money goes out to the other bank (PACS.008), the other bank cannot book it (as the account doesn’t exist) and should automatically return it to you (PACS.004).
If by chance the other bank is incompliant and does not return the money, you can have your bank send a recall message (CAMT.056) to try and retrieve the funds. The other bank is then compelled to either refund the money (PACS.004 again) or at the least officially communicate they’re keeping your money (CAMT.029).
At that point, there’s still law and legal avenues to pursue.
One thing that does not and can not happen though, is for the money to vanish into a black hole and be removed from the economy. That is what a stable, standardized and reasonably regulated industry with some centralization does for you.