Bangladesh Bank, NY Fed Discuss Suing Manila Bank For Heist Damages (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Bangladesh's central bank has asked the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to join a lawsuit it plans to file against a Philippines bank for its role in one of the world's biggest cyber-heists, several sources said. The Fed is yet to respond formally, but there is no indication it would join the suit. Unidentified hackers stole $81 million from Bangladesh Bank's account at the New York Fed in February last year, using fraudulent orders on the SWIFT payments system. The money was sent to accounts at Manila-based Rizal Commercial Banking Corp and then disappeared into the casino industry in the Philippines.

Comments

It was an inside job.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Bangaladesh is suing Phillipines banks for purely political cover and to white wash the affair.

It was pulled off with insiders in the bank. They knew the exact process. Orders and acknowledgements were printed and kept track of. They first disabled the printer with some innocuous manner. It is possible they caused the same failure a few times before to stop them from getting suspicious. Then on a Friday, sent the money transfer orders. Acknowledgement was stuck in the print spool. NY Fed released the funds after giving enough time for Bangaladesh to countermand or correct errors.

It was NYFed noticing the typos and errors in the order that stopped the bleeding at 80 million dollars. If not, they would have drained ALL the funds of the government of Bangaladesh.

Now they are opening a dog and pony show by suing Phillipines to distract the local population, politicians and the press. It was done with the complicity of the highest level officers in Bangaladesh.

Re:It was an inside job.

[yaznaz]

Is your claim just your personal opinion or backed by some investigation. The fact that a malware was used and FBI suspects North Korea would point to outsiders in this heist. The money was laundered via banks in Philippines - a country that has had formal ties with North Korea in past and is a familiar ground for NK operatives. And hiding laundering trace via junked operators is not an obvious strategy for a banker and reflects prior experience in such operations. I would also doubt any internal hand clever enough to pull this off would attempt a sum of $2 billion. It is simply too large to hide for someone from a small country like Bangladesh. Plus, any political angle to this would result in so many leaks that it would be impossible not to have surfaced by now with such high profile international investigation.

Re:Why is this an issue

[FeelGood314]

SWIFT is the accounting mechanism used by the banks between each other. The banks don't have physical currency that they move between each other it is all 1s and 0s like a crypto currency. When you do personal banking the receiving bank gets the 1s and 0s almost instantly and based on the nature of the transaction they have rules to stop the recipient from moving the money but as far as SWIFT is concerned the transaction can't be reversed. Now this type of transaction is extremely common for SWIFT and other than some one in Germany noticing* that the word "foundation" was miss spelled there was no reason for the transaction to be suspicious or even to be scrutinized. There might be some rules for the Philippines bank to stop the transfer to a casino but that's not something I would put a lot of faith in.

*I suspect that some group within SWIFT knew the Bangladesh's central bank had terrible security and were looking at all transactions above a certain amount without telling the Bangladesh's central bank. It's just too lucky that someone just happened to notice something fishy. Central banks move hundreds of millions regularly to stabilize currency or to facilitate large state transactions. Their wasn't anything suspicious about these.

Why is North Korea suddenly popular to blame

[FeelGood314]

Suddenly North Korea is getting a lot of blame for these cyber crimes. I'm seeing a lot of headlines but almost no citations of actual evidence. I'm currently lacking a new source that I don't treat with a high degree of skepticism and articles like this don't help. The internet should make reporters lives easier but instead it makes it easier for me to fact check reporters. My fact checking is a biased sampling, I'll usually only check articles that are a "little off" but I would say nearly 90% of the time I check the reporter has gotten something significant wrong or missed something that is not only important but is also counter to the opinion the reporter was pushing. I'll pay for good news. I won't pay for someone to just echo back my opinions. That's what facebook is for.

Re:Precedent

[gurps_npc]

If someone at the Philippines bank facilitated a theft from the Bangladesh bank, then the Bangladesh people can and SHOULD sue the Philippine bank.

Even if some people at the Bangladesh bank also facilitated the theft.

If your neighbor's son helps your son steal from you, damn right you would want your neighbor to at least partially reimburse you for the damage.

Even if you are talking 10%, that's a lot of money.