<p>The attacker would have needed to access your private key to sign a valid transaction. If that happened and you observed the transaction in a mempool then you could broadcast a competing transaction with a higher fee rate. It would then be a race to see which transaction got mined and included in a block and the attacker's transaction would have had a headstart (it would have been propagated across the network for a longer period of time).</p>
<p>This isn't technically RBF, RBF generally refers to bumping the fee for a transaction spending to the same destination.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2022-10-27T17:01:17.987Z
RBF is just replace-by-fee, i.e. the policy of preferring the higher-fee variant in case of conflicts. Its primary use case is feebumping, but can it be anything. There have been proposed other policies in the past like first-seen-safe-replace-by-fee (FSS-RBF) which would pretty much only be usable for feebumping.
Pieter Wuille
CC BY-SA 4.0
2022-10-27T16:34:39.897Z
2022-10-27T16:34:39.897Z
Michael Folkson
<p>If you saw a transaction from a UTXO you control in the mempool that you didn't sign (i.e. it was stolen), could you use RBF to move it to an address you control before it was confirmed?</p>

<replace-by-fee><theft>
Could you use RBF to take back stolen funds?
Isenko Chubb
# Could you use RBF to take back stolen funds?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2022-10-27)

If you saw a transaction from a UTXO you control in the mempool that you didn't sign (i.e. it was stolen), could you use RBF to move it to an address you control before it was confirmed?

**Tags:** replace-by-fee, theft


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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2022-10-27. Score: 1

The attacker would have needed to access your private key to sign a valid transaction. If that happened and you observed the transaction in a mempool then you could broadcast a competing transaction with a higher fee rate. It would then be a race to see which transaction got mined and included in a block and the attacker's transaction would have had a headstart (it would have been propagated across the network for a longer period of time).

This isn't technically RBF, RBF generally refers to bumping the fee for a transaction spending to the same destination.

> **Comments:**
> **username_2**: RBF is just replace-by-fee, i.e. the policy of preferring the higher-fee variant in case of conflicts. Its primary use case is feebumping, but can it be anything. There have been proposed other policies in the past like first-seen-safe-replace-by-fee (FSS-RBF) which would pretty much only be usable for feebumping.  

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