system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What happens when digital money is stolen? How is it moved to a different bank account? And more importantly why can't some hacker just "create" money instead of moving it?

As asked by someone, by "digital money" I mean the financial report kept in a bank, not cryptocurrencies.
gpt
Creating money is much easier to spot if the banks are running their systems properly. Banks don't just create money (disclaimer; sometimes they kind of do) - so whenever they have money going into an account it must have come out of an account somewhere.

Even if you are paying in physical cash to a bank, the total cash brought in can be compared to the total 'digital' money added to make sure they are the same.

So if you have created money there will be an error somewhere when the bank 'reconciles' its records. Which means the bank knows quite quickly that something has gone wrong and may look into it.

It it much easier to create fake payments, so move money from one account to another account. That way the bank doesn't know anything wrong happened - the only person who can tell is the other account holder, and it is on them to prove they didn't authorise the payment.

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As to where it goes [disclaimer; not a bank thief]; yes, you'd move it into a different bank account. Ideally then into another bank account, maybe at another bank, maybe move it through joint accounts or mixed with other money, trying to 'launder' it as much as possible, and hopefully get it to a bank that is in a different jurisdiction to the original one and has strict rules on privacy (the classic "offshore bank accounts" or "numbered accounts" where not even the bank has records of who owns the account).

The idea is to get the money either somewhere it can't be 'traced' (either practically or legally) or get it out of the banking system before anyone spots that it has been stolen.