The Billion Dollar Spelling Mistake - Digital criminals digital world
March 18, 2016 5:48 AM   Subscribe

Following on from this recent post regarding the Hatton Garden heist with a value thought to be in the region of £35M (~$50M US) comes another Bank heist - this time on an all together much larger scale. Last month hackers thought to have utilised run of the mill script kiddie malware breached weak security controls at the Central Bank of Bangladesh. Multiple transfer requests totalling nearly $1 billion were then sent to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, allowing $81 million to transfer before one of the routing banks Deutsche Bank queried with CBB after noticing a spelling mistake on a fake end party ; Sri Lankan NGO Shalika Fandation not Foundation. Bank Chairman Atiur Rahman has unsurprisingly quit after trying to hide the loss from the Government and Board of Directors until the story leaked to a newspaper in the Philippines.
posted by numberstation (7 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
Typos are exactly the real reason I don't hack for crime. And tech is helping, the android spellcheck/correct "FIXED" a phone number the other day!?!?!
posted by sammyo at 6:53 AM on March 18, 2016


Hello criminal masterminds, I am an obsessive proofreader and professional editor. Since copy typically comprises the most visible part of your scam (emails, direct mail fraud, falsified legal/government documents, etc.), why can't you be arsed to ensure it's all correct?

You've got the getaway driver, the distraction (little kid, seducer or old person), the money launderer/dirty accountant and criminal lawyer tropes, but where's the "person who proofreads all the scam copy and gets paid through an LLC in the Cayman Islands" trope when you need it?

MeMail me for hourly rates.
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 9:07 AM on March 18, 2016 [6 favorites]


tl; dspchk
posted by Fizz at 2:13 PM on March 18, 2016


I would be interested in membership in a "Fandation". Sounds cool.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:31 PM on March 18, 2016


Another article said that Rahman only discovered the theft through the media, and it was a couple of deputy directors that hid it from him.
posted by wilful at 2:39 AM on March 19, 2016


In one of the articles, they're saying they doubt they'll ever catch the hackers. But how do you launder that much money?
Four requests to transfer a total of about $81 million to the Philippines went through.... the unusually large number of payment instructions and the transfer requests to private entities - as opposed to other banks - raised suspicions at the Fed....
It's not like the Fed shipped over bags of bills. How could the hackers possibly move that much money into an anonymous transaction that would leave no trace of their identity?
posted by clawsoon at 7:29 PM on March 19, 2016


After that thread on AskMe where the bank person said that transfers were accepted from known email addresses including a PDF of the correct form, I'm not surprised by this.
posted by scruss at 7:38 AM on March 20, 2016


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