The Gulf Time Newspaper One of the finest business newspapers in the UAE brought to you by our professional writers and editors.
Dhaka / Bloomberg
A printer error first tipped off Bangladesh’s central bank to one of the biggest cyber heists in recent history, according to a complaint filed to police that provided new details on the attempted theft of nearly $1 billion.
Zubair Bin Huda, a joint director of Bangladesh Bank, found the printer tray empty when he looked on the morning of February 5 for confirmations of SWIFT financial transactions that are normally printed automatically overnight.
“We thought it was a common problem just like any other day,†Huda said in the complaint. Because it was a Friday — a weekend in Bangladesh — Huda left the office and asked his colleagues to help fix the problem. It took them more than 24 hours before they could manually print the receipts, which revealed dozens of questionable transactions that sent the bank racing to stop cash from leaving its account with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to the Philippines, Sri Lanka and beyond.