But my point is that the money was in a US Bank located in NYCity.
Lots of stories when it was discovered, up to March 15, and then...nothing?
no follow up stories? What, they took off ten days for Easter holiday? (here in the Philippines, the country shuts down for a week, but that is no excuse for the US reporters).
so I checked Google news on the Philippines....one story there. Yes, ONE. Dated March 25th, updated March 28th, from a Bengladesh newspaper: Saying they want their money back.
Googling Bangladesh on google news shows ten articles.Nine about the heist and most in local papers saying they want to get their money back.
This report from 3/24 summarizes the heist. And it reports that the heist didn't happen in March, but in February, and the first report that these billions of dollars were stolen was in...the Philippine Inquirer.
And the transfer happened during the Chinese New Year (a time when Philippines has a bank holiday...we have lots of holidays: Catholic, Muslim, local patriotic days, Chinese new year...no time off for Nowruz yet, but give us time)
and I would say this is corruption in the Philippines as usual, which was sniffed out and reported by our excellent reporters in the Philippines.
But where are the reporters in the USA? Several big companies were involved:
and it used the SWIFT transfer system to move the funding.They say they weren't hacked, but it was an insider job.
Bangladesh Bank officials said the funds were sent to those countries through banking and financial services company Wells Fargo, the Bank of New York Mellon and Citibank of New York.
Wikipedia page here (caution: Who knows if it is accurate).
Reuters article March 21 from a Japanese newspaper has a summary and notes the casino industry pressure to keep the casinos out of money laudering laws, and also notes the Chinese links.
we have corruption here but I suspect the Philippines will be made the fall guy for people who actually did the heist.
the Wikipedia article links to this Pakistani article (dated March 11) says hackers installed malware into the Bangaladesh bank's software, collected information and then self destructed.
They have a timeline: apparently the plan started in May 2015...
more HERE.
Security week report March 16 claims that no one noticed the problem for 4 days because the printer wasn't working properly.
The Atlantic has an article summarizing mostly old news, but naming names. published on March 25:
the casinos are at the center of the scam. Follow the money and you might really open a can of worms.
Go has denied owning the accounts through which the money was consolidated, or to playing any role in the heist. A representative of Philrem told the Senate panel that Deguito instructed the company to transfer the money to two casinos, as well as to an account owned by a businessman named Weikang Xu.
Xu reportedly received $30 million; $29 million passed to a casino resort called Solarie. The rest landed in yet another casino, this one owned by Eastern Hawaii Leisure Company Limited. The president of that company, a man named Kam Sin Wong, who also goes by Kim Wong, was described by Filipino Senator Sergio Osmeña III as “a missing link” in the story.“There is an orchestrator here, a mastermind, and right now, it looks like it’s Kim Wong,” Osmeña told reporters.Go has denied owning the accounts through which the money was consolidated, or to playing any role in the heist. A representative of Philrem told the Senate panel that Deguito instructed the company to transfer the money to two casinos, as well as to an account owned by a businessman named Weikang Xu.Xu reportedly received $30 million; $29 million passed to a casino resort called Solarie. The rest landed in yet another casino, this one owned by Eastern Hawaii Leisure Company Limited. The president of that company, a man named Kam Sin Wong, who also goes by Kim Wong, was described by Filipino Senator Sergio Osmeña III as “a missing link” in the story.“There is an orchestrator here, a mastermind, and right now, it looks like it’s Kim Wong,” Osmeña told reporters.
and the casinos have links to drug money, maybe by laundering the money via bets etc. in casinos.(Dec 2013 article).
A highly reliable source at the said resort and casino, however, clarified that the management of the casino does not have any knowledge about the transactions between the players and the drug lords cum gambling financiers.
The source said that millions and millions of cash change hands between some bigitme VIP baccarat players and these financiers every night inside the VIP rooms of the said casino.
Each financier or drug lord has his or her own territory or VIP room to operate. In short, there is an agreement of assigned areas among the financiers.
In the meanwhile Global research (anti globalist conspiracy) site has a headsup on what this means to ordinary people, and links it to all sorts of shennanigans (some real, some paranoid) that have gone on.
they note what is reported elsewhere: a larger heist was stopped by misspelling. So a German bank that caught and questioned the transfer.
and they note that this wasn't the only bank hack:
A rather sobering and even scary realization is had the hacker(s) properly spelled the word foundation, perhaps a billion dollars would have been stolen before anyone in the central banking system would have even caught on that they were duped by some mysterious anonymous cyber-criminal(s) who fortunately for them flunked English spelling class.
That of course doesn't include hackers who get your money via identity theft, like the Hackers who got my Federal personnel file when the gov't computers were hacked last year.
This business of online hackers cracking cyber security systems is anything but new. In 2015 the Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab disclosed that an estimated total of $1 billion has already been stolen by multinational hacking gangsters from up to 100 banking institutions around the globe just within the last two years.
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update: more on how the hackers did it here.
they claimed the hackers stalked the bank for two weeks, but the time line goes back much further, since it took more time than that to set up the bank accounts. And it probably aimed at doing it during the Chinese new year to slow down discovery.
no, this wasn't a fast hack job: It was professional inside job at many levels.
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update two: Well, one congresslady is questioning the NYCity bank connection (Seattle times March 23).
“This brazen heist … threatens to undermine the confidence that foreign central banks have in the Federal Reserve, and in the safety and soundness of international monetary transactions,” Maloney said in her letter Tuesday to New York Fed President William Dudley.
“We need a thorough investigation to determine how these criminals were able to manipulate the system” to prevent it from happening again, she said.
Maloney also is asking why the New York Fed requested that Bangladesh Bank reconfirm all 35 transfer orders, but failed to wait until it received reconfirmation before executing the first five orders.
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