Hackers stole the money from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
By Sreekanth A. Nair
Bangladesh Central Bank’s governor Atiur Rahman resigned on Tuesday after some unknown hackers stole more than $100 million from the banks account in Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Earlier, Bangladesh Finance Minister AMA Muhith had asked him to step down after confirming the theft.
Rahman kept the incident away from the government for weeks though it happened onFebruary 4, said reports. He submitted his resignation to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
“If my resignation is better for the Bangladesh Bank, I have no hesitation,” AP quoted him as saying.
Rahman, 64, was appointed as the governor of the central bank seven years ago. Rahman has been leading the bank successfully by reaching out to rural people of Bangladesh.
The authorities have confirmed that $81 million was transferred to the Philippines and the rest of the money to Sri Lanka.
Media reports said that the hackers group managed to intrude into the internal process of Bangladesh’s central bank and stole some credentials to make the money transfer requests legitimate.
But a small mistake committed by the hackers alerted the bank officials leading to unearthing the biggest bank theft ever. The hackers misspelled the name of a bank account. The number of money transfer requests was unusually high. The payee accounts were private accounts. These two facts also made the bank officials suspicious.
Deutsche Bank, which was helping to transfer the money, asked the Bangladesh government for clarification when they found some requests suspicious. Then only it was realized that all the previous requests were fake.
If the theft hadn’t been found out at this stage, the hackers would have stolen almost $1 billion.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York had also alerted the government about some transactions that appeared suspicious. But the Bangladesh government resorted to blaming the bank publicly for not spotting the fraud earlier.
The government has decided to appoint former finance secretary Fazle Kabir as the new governor of Bangladesh Bank. The government has also sought the help of the governments in the Philippines and Sri Lanka and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to recover the money.