Plot Thickens In New York Fed Heist As $30 Million In Cash Said Delivered To Mystery Chinese Man
By Tyler Durden
One week ago, we documented the Hollywood-esque theft of $100 million from accounts held at the NY Fed and belonging to the central bank of Bangladesh.
In many ways, the heist was elegantly planned and executed and in others it was comically amateurish.
Here are the basics: On February 5, Bill Dudley’s New York Fed was allegedly “penetrated” when “hackers” (of supposed Chinese origin) stole $100 million from accounts belonging to the Bangladesh central bank. The money was then channeled to the Philippines where it was sold on the black market and funneled to “local casinos” (to quote AFP). After the casino laundering, it was sent back to the same black market FX broker who promptly moved it to “overseas accounts within days.”
Basically, hackers got ahold of Bangladesh’s SWIFT codes and bombarded the NY Fed with requests for funds from the country’s FX reserves. Mercifully, the Fed declined to clear separate transfers worth some $870 million, but not before $100 million got away.
Four transfer requests totaling $81 million went through, but a fifth was held up when whoever was making the request tried to have $20 million sent to an imaginary NGO called Shalika Foundation but accidentally spelled “foundation” as “fandation.”
According to the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the money was routed to three casino bank accounts via the Jupiter Street, Makati City, branch of Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. The country’s gaming regulator was investigating.
Now, we get new details on what is a truly fascinating story.
First, we learn that the hackers who spelled “foundation” wrong weren’t the only ones to do something silly. The requests came in on a Friday, which is notable because as WSJ writes, “Friday is the weekend in Bangladesh and the central bank’s offices were closed.”
So, “the fact that the money was being wired to personal bank accounts in the Philippines rang alarm bells,” but apparently, the fact that it was a weekend did not.
Still, there were people at the office.
In fact, it was a printer error that tipped Bangladesh off to the scam. “Zubair Bin Huda, a joint director of Bangladesh Bank, found the printer tray empty when he looked on the morning of Feb. 5 for confirmations of SWIFT financial transactions that are normally printed automatically overnight,” Bloomberg reports. “Because it was a Friday — a weekend in Muslim-majority Bangladesh — Huda left the office around 11:15 a.m. and asked his colleagues to help fix the problem [but] it took them more than 24 hours before they could manually print the receipts, which revealed dozens of questionable transactions that sent the bank racing to stop cash from leaving its account with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to the Philippines, Sri Lanka and beyond.”
As the story goes, Huda came into the office on Saturday and found a flashing message on the terminal connecting to the SWIFT system that read: …read more
Source: Plot Thickens In New York Fed Heist As $30 Million In Cash Said Delivered To Mystery Chinese Man
