DHAKA: Bangladesh Bank (BB) has written a letter to the Federal Reserve chair seeking assistance to recover its funds stolen by cyber thieves.
Fazle Kabir, who took the reins of the central bank on March 20, also sent similar letters of late to Bangladesh’s permanent representative in the United Nations, the governor of the Philippines’ central bank and the head of its anti-money laundering council.
“We have launched a coordinated battle to recover the stolen funds,” Shubhankar Saha, executive director and spokesman of the BB, told The Daily Star. “The new governor has requested the Fed to probe whether there was any fault on their part in disbursing the funds,” he said.
Bangladesh’s central bank lost US$101 million to hackers from its foreign currency reserve account with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on February 5. The Fed released the funds against five payment orders. Cyber thieves made another 30 payment orders, worth around $800 million, but those attempts were thwarted by the US central bank.
Upon a request from the BB, Pan Asia Banking Corporation of Sri Lanka cancelled the payment of $20 million to its ultimate beneficiary. But the $81 million that entered the Philippines’ banking system was credited to beneficiary accounts with the Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation and eventually withdrawn.
“We want to know why payments were made against the five orders and what the issue was with the rest 30 orders. Did the Fed follow the right procedures?” Saha said. Soon after the incident, Andrea Priest, a New York Fed spokeswoman, said the payment instructions in question were fully authenticated by the SWIFT messaging system in accordance with standard authentication protocols.Earlier in February, a BB team visited the Philippines to talk to their counterparts on the issue.
