Billion dollar bank heist long-planned
It took the perpetrators of the $101 million digital heist at Bangladesh Bank over a year to collect inclusive information of the institution’s internal workings to neatly do the job, according to experts.
It is not clear whether anyone from Bangladesh helped the perpetrators to hack Bangladesh Bank’s account in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Sources in the central bank said the perpetrators had been spying for a long time on Bangladesh Bank’s transactions of SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), a member-owned cooperative that banks use for account transfer requests and other secure messages.
A top Bangladesh Bank official said the hackers even had information on the central’s bank current account in the New York Fed. Moreover, they used to monitor the purposes of BB account’s money transfer and transactions to the New York Fed.
The hackers breached Bangladesh Bank's systems and stole its credentials for payment transfers. They then bombarded the New York Fed with nearly three dozen requests to move all the money from the Bangladesh Bank's account there to entities in the Philippines and Sri Lanka, the official said.
Four requests to transfer a total of about $81 million to the Philippines went through, but a fifth, for $20 million, to a Sri Lankan non-profit organisation was held up.
Bangladesh Bank has billions of dollars in the current account with the Fed, which it uses for international settlements.
Bangladesh Bank is optimistic about retrieving 8.10 crore dollars from the Philippines. The central bank’s spokesperson and executive director Subhankar Saha told reporters that Philippines central bank and anti-money laundering authority were very active on the issue and had made some progresses. “So far we have received positive responses and are optimistic about getting the money back.”
Despite this major incident, the central bank’s governor Atiur Rahman flew to India to attend IMF’s meeting at New Delhi.
Prothom Alo contacted Andrea Priest, head of media relations and public affairs at Federal Reserve Bank of New York, through e-mail. She replied that the transaction orders were made through due process. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has been cooperating with Bangladesh Bank since the incident.
She claimed that there were no documents which would suggest that Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s system was misused.
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