Reuters has reported that a cybercrime maven has gone missing in Bangladesh just after talking to police and media outlets about a brazen $951 million would-be theft from the country’s central bank. The disappearance of Tanveer Hassan Zoha was reported by his wife, said the newswire on Sunday (March 20). She said that he disappeared in a rickshaw, hustled away by strangers who blindfolded him.
Brazen though it would have been at any real dollar amount, the virtual heist — originally targeting the $951 million to come from the central bank’s holdings with the Federal Reserve of New York last month — made off with $81 million, with that landing at casinos based in the Philippines, said the newswire. In the wake of the news of what happened, one bank governor, Atiur Rahman, resigned.
Reuters noted that, before Zoha disappeared, he had met and gone with members of “a special police force” to the central bank, and the group was at the central bank for “several hours.” Zoha then met with the media and said that he knew three user IDs that had been part of the heist efforts.
As has been reported separately by The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has been looking into the theft, and Bangladeshi officials are investigating as well. In addition to the $81 million mentioned above, there was an additional $20 million in ill-gotten gains moved to a bank in Sri Lanka. At least some of the money moved to the casinos, said WSJ, had been converted into gambling chips from cash. Those chips may have, in turn, been used to launder funds that were taken by the cyberthieves, who used malicious code to make their way into computers, according to sources close to the investigations.
