Commuters pass by the front of the Bangladesh central bank building in Dhaka, March 8, 2016 (REUTERS / Ashikur Rahman)
Dhaka: Bangladesh’s central bank will send a team of officials to the Philippines today to push for the recovery of more of the $81m stolen from its account at the New York Federal Reserve last year and routed through a bank in Manila.
Bangladesh Bank has been able to retrieve only about $15m of the money stolen in one of the world’s biggest cyber heists.
A Bangladesh Bank lawyer, Ajmalul Hossain, told Reuters yesterday the bank was working on “various ways” to get back the rest of the money from institutions in the Philippines.
Hossain said two officials from Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit, controlled by the central bank, would meet representatives of the Philippine Department of Justice, Anti-Money Laundering Council and a presidential commission, among others.
Hossain declined to give details of the strategy to recover the money from the heist, which according to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation was state-sponsored.
On the evening of February 4 last year, the yet-to-be-identified hackers initiated fake transfer orders which sought to move nearly $1bn from Bangladesh Bank’s New York Fed account mostly to accounts at the Manila-based Rizal Commercial Banking Corp (RCBC).
Many of the transfer orders initiated by the hackers were blocked or reversed by intermediary banks, but $81m made it to accounts in fake names at RCBC. Most of the funds then disappeared into Manila’s loosely regulated casino industry.
The Philippines’ Anti-Money Laundering Council has accused several RCBC officials of money-laundering in a complaint filed at its Justice Department, though the bank has blamed only a couple of rogue officials.
Bangladesh Bank and RCBC have exchanged accusations of responsibility for the crime.
RCBC was fined a record $19.54m by the Philippine central bank for its failure to prevent the movement of the stolen money through its bank, while a top Bangladeshi investigator has said he suspected some IT technicians from the Dhaka-based bank helped the hackers carry out the heist.
The $15m that Bangladesh has been able to recover is part of $35m that Manila casino boss Kim Wong had told a Philippines Senate inquiry he received from two Chinese gamblers without knowing it was stolen.
