That raises another point - if Swift is just a messaging system, then where are the funds?
There can be some interesting things which happen to wire transfers. One of my larger escrow deals was an $11M portfolio purchase involving several thousand domain names, with the seller in Australia and a purchaser (Demand Media) in California, and two intermediary banks. Disbursements were made in stages as names were transferred from various registrar accounts, but at one point a $5M wire transfer simply appeared to evaporate, and did not come out the other end for four days. When I initiated a trace, there was a delay of two more days, and I did not get a clear answer other than an unexplained silence between the first and second intermediary banks.
What I was eventually led to believe by an officer of my bank was that there are circumstances under which the US Treasury Department can incur an investigatory delay, and that the banks involved cannot tell you that there is a potential money laundering inquiry being looked into. After a total of around seven business days, the payment showed up at the other end, but it was a pretty tense week, since I had no idea that much money could simply disappear into a black hole like that.
I was apparently under investigation for a while since, at one point in time I was receiving a monthly retainer from Uniregistry in Cayman by wire, and around the same time of the month I was sending an allowance to my stepdaughter, who was away at college. My wife had kept her own surname through her first and second marriages, so her daughter did not have either her surname or mine. One day, I received a call from my bank who had some "questions about recent transactions". They asked me about the monthly payment "from the Cayman Islands" and I said that was a client on retainer, and then asked me "Who is [name of my stepdaughter]?". Apparently, they had flagged the fact that I was receiving a payment from abroad which appeared linked to a payment to a woman who did not share either my surname or that of my wife. I don't know what they were thinking, but I got pretty stoked when they asked that question with an air of "we know what you've been up to."
In answer to your question about "legal options" the general reality of these sorts of things is that undertaking any sort of legal action in the US is not worthwhile for transactions of this size unless you are physically present in a jurisdiction where you can pursue your own small claims cases. If you swindle someone out of $75,001, that's the threshold where they can file in federal court, and the FBI might be interested, but if you swindle 75,000 people out of $1 a piece, you're going to be fine, as a practical matter.
To hire a lawyer to file a lawsuit for you in the US, you are generally looking at writing a check for anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 for starters, depending on the case. We do not have a "loser pays" system in the US, so, sure, you can easily spend $40,000 to successfully get through a lawsuit against someone who ripped you off for $5,000.
That's why, in general, most of the "I'm looking for someone to sue [insert registrar]" threads at Namepros are pretty much non-starters.
The problem is that people in the US are familiar with personal injury attorneys who advertise "we don't get paid unless you get paid" or they hear about people winning high dollar amounts in personal injury lawsuits. That's an entirely different world from commercial disputes. If you fall down in a grocery store and break your arm, that store has insurance. The insurance is going to cut a check for $X, to settle the suit. Personal injury lawyers know how much insurers pay for what kinds of injuries, so they can quickly get that check written and take a 40% cut of it.
But if the dispute is something like breach of contract for $5000. Then you are usually playing for $5000, total. There's no pain and suffering, ongoing trauma, etc., to deal with and no outrageous medical bills.
Incidentally, those medical bills are why ordinary injuries end up being lawsuits in the US, but not in countries with rational medical systems, because (a) the store customers have medical insurance, and (b) the store has liability insurance. If a customer is injured in the store, then the customer's medical insurance says "We're not paying your bills, because the store has insurance". The store's insurer says, "We're not paying your bills, because you had a pre-exising or later injury, and your medical problems weren't caused by the fall". So, both insurance companies require the parties to sue each other - not to determine which party pays, but to determine which insurance company has to pay. But that's why everyone gets the impression that Americans are always suing one another for minor things, because most other advanced countries don't use this ridiculous system to figure out who pays medical bills.
But this one falls into the bucket of "I've been ripped off for $3750, but it's going to cost me at least $10k to do anything about it".
