This article is more than 1 year old

$10m of Bangladeshi SWIFT heist ended up in Filipino Casino

Chinese high-rollers muled the money, thankfully didn't put it all on Red

At least some of the US$81 million lifted from Bangladeshi banks in recent hacks on the Society for Worldwide Interbank Telecommunication (SWIFT) inter-bank transfer network has been tracked down to a casino in the Philippines.

The February heist relied on malware dropped on a SWIFT terminal used by Bangladesh's central bank. The terminal was visible to the miscreants because the network in that country had no firewall.

SWIFT pointed its finger squarely at Bangladesh for its lax security and threatened to suspend banks that didn't toughen up their defences.

In spite of the warning, attackers lifted $10 million from the Ukraine in June, and in August it sent yet another warning that other banks had been popped.

The news that some of the money has been recovered comes from Reuters, which says some of the Bangladeshi money landed in a Philippines casino.

A Philippines court decided in September that the money belongs to the Bangladesh bank.

The funds were surrendered by casino operator Eastern Hawaii Leisure Company run by Kim Wong, who said the money came from two Chinese high-rollers.

Bangladesh's ambassador to the Philippines John Gomes told Reuters there's more to come: “now the process on this $15 million is more or less completed, we will go for the rest”. ®

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