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In the board game Monopoly, when the bank makes an error in your favor, the player gets to keep the money. A hedge fund manager is acting as if he has drawn that lucky card for real, a lawsuit against him contends.

Credit Suisse says it wired a total of $1.5 million in three transactions to the hedge fund’s bank account on one day in January. Two weeks later, according to its lawsuit, the bank realized it had made a mistake: At the time of the wire transfers, the hedge fund, Galbraith Capital Investment Management, was winding down operations and it had no cash left in its account with Credit Suisse.

The bank asked for its money back.

It is still waiting.

The bank sued Galbraith Capital and its manager, Joseph B. Galbraith, seeking to recover the money. Credit Suisse filed a motion in a New York State court in August seeking a default judgment against Mr. Galbraith and the hedge fund. At a hearing this month, a New York State judge orally granted a judgment against the hedge fund but not against Mr. Galbraith, a person briefed on the matter said. Mr. Galbraith has yet to file a legal response in the case or be personally served with court papers.

So now Credit Suisse is left to play a different game: Where in the world is Joseph B. Galbraith?

People who know Mr. Galbraith, 42, who renounced his United States citizenship in 2011, say they think he is living with his second wife in Europe, possibly in Monaco.

Reached by a reporter recently via email, Mr. Galbraith said he had not been aware of the Credit Suisse lawsuit. In an email, he said the accusations against him were “ridiculous, bordering on laughable” and part of an effort to malign and slander his character.

The litigation offers a rare glimpse into the kind of money transfer mistakes that sometimes take place between hedge funds and their banks. Servicing money transfers for hedge funds is part of a lucrative business for Wall Street, known as prime brokerage, which also involves lending money to funds and processing trades. Disputes between banks and hedge funds tend to be resolved amicably and are seldom aired in public.

A number of people who work for other hedge funds said that while wiring errors do occur, the amount of money at issue in the case of Mr. Galbraith is larger than normal. Some of those people also expressed surprise that Credit Suisse had made three separate wire transactions that were all in error.

Perhaps more surprising is how long it took Credit Suisse to realize it made a mistake when it wired the money to an account at the Toronto branch of the Royal Bank of Canada for a hedge fund based in Florida. It transferred the money on Jan. 13, and not until Jan. 27 did it begin contacting Mr. Galbraith and his employees to seek the return of the $1.5 million, according to court papers.

Credit Suisse and its lawyers declined to comment

Court papers filed as part of the litigation include an email correspondence with Mr. Galbraith from early February, when the hedge fund manager told a Credit Suisse employee he was away on a skiing trip but had been talking to his bank about returning the money.

“Don’t panic over there, I’m dealing with this,” Mr. Galbraith said in a Feb. 5 email.

The bank said that email was the last response it had from either Mr. Galbraith or anyone else with his fund.

Credit Suisse said in the lawsuit that when it contacted Royal Bank of Canada on Feb. 5 to inquire where the money was, it was told that Mr. Galbraith had refused to give his approval to reverse the wire transfers. Credit Suisse, which did not name Royal Bank as a defendant in the lawsuit, said in the complaint, “It is clear Galbraith was intentionally misleading” it and never intended to return the money.

The dispute punctuates a messy end to Mr. Galbraith’s career as a hedge fund manager in the United States. For about seven years, he ran a hedge fund firm that once had $120 million under management. The firm, which was based in Safety Harbor, Fla., specialized in trading stocks and stock indexes.

And it is not just Credit Suisse that appears to have issues with Mr. Galbraith.

His hedge fund is also in a legal dispute with a computer technology company that contends it is owed more than $130,000 in fees.

Last month, the financial regulator in Monaco, a small principality on the French Riviera that is home to the superrich and celebrities, posted a warning on its website about a firm called Galbraith Capital. The warning advised investors not to do business with the firm, which it said “wrongly claims to have implanted offices in Monaco” and was engaged in “cold calling” potential customers.

Mr. Galbraith said he was unaware of the notice, and he questioned whether it referred to his firm, which at one time claimed to have an office in Monaco, as well as in Florida, Toronto and the Bahamas. He suggested that Monaco officials might have relied on an old LinkedIn page for the hedge fund.

“It’s true we did have a dozen employees all over the world (at our peak) but the only person in Monaco was myself,” Mr. Galbraith said in an email response. “I was an architect and a programmer of trading systems and not a marketing guy and cold calling is a joke for sure.”

A representative for the Monaco financial authority declined to elaborate on the warning.

Mr. Galbraith graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1996 with a master’s degree in mathematics. He began his professional life as an insurance consultant for a big auditing firm. In 2004, Mr. Galbraith started a hedge fund after having some success investing on his own, he told a business newspaper on Florida’s Gulf Coast, The Business Observer, in 2005.

Galbraith Capital had one of its best years in 2007, when one portfolio registered a 22 percent return, according to people with knowledge of the firm’s historical numbers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The hedge fund lifestyle certainly agreed with Mr. Galbraith. In a financial statement filed in connection with his 2011 divorce from his first wife, with whom he had three children, Mr. Galbraith reported having $5.7 million in assets, including two luxury cars — a Ferrari and a Porsche — and a motorboat. The divorce papers refer to Mr. Galbraith at one point as having a bank account in Switzerland and spending most of his time in Monaco and Brazil, where his second wife was born.

But Galbraith Capital’s performance flagged in recent years, and Mr. Galbraith decided to wind down the fund and return money to investors. In the second half of 2013, Steven Grezeck, the firm’s top trader and former chief operating officer, left the firm.

Mr. Grezeck said he had not seen or spoken to Mr. Galbraith in almost a year. One of the last times he had any interaction with Mr. Galbraith, Mr. Grezeck said, was when he served as a witness and notary on the deed of sale for the $1 million home in Florida that Mr. Galbraith and his former wife had owned in Safety Harbor, a small town near Clearwater, Fla.

In the bitter divorce litigation with his former wife, Mr. Galbraith — who chose to expatriate himself in 2011, according to a quarterly Internal Revenue Service filing — vowed on several occasions never to return to the United States. In one email attached to the litigation papers, Mr. Galbraith told his wife: “I hate the [expletive] place and what it represents.”

Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.