A printer fault at Bangladesh's central bank meant that overseas queries about suspicious transactions went unanswered, according to a report seen today on the USD 81 million cyber heist that sent shockwaves through the banking world.
The report, filed to police yesterday, recounts the events leading to the discovery of the dramatic theft from an overseas account of Bangladesh Bank.
It says that because of a printer and software problem, it took the Bangladesh central bank nearly four days to ask banks across the globe to halt payments to the hackers.
They tried to steal around USD 1 billion and got away with USD 81 million from the impoverished country's coffers.
Central bank governor Atiur Rahman and two of the deputy governors have lost their jobs over the scandal, which has hugely embarrassed the government and raised alarm over the security of the country's foreign exchange reserves of over USD 27 billion.
Today the government, which has said it was kept in the dark about the losses for weeks, also removed its most senior banking official M Aslam Alam from his position.
The hackers managed to transfer USD 81 million on February 5 -- a Friday, when Bangladesh Bank is closed -- from its account with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, transferring the cash electronically to accounts in the Philippines.
In the report seen by AFP, the bank's joint director Zubair bin Huda said engineers were unable to fix the printers until February 6, a day after the New York bank sent queries about four separate transactions.
"Since such glitches happened before, we thought it was a common problem just like any other day," Huda said in the report.
Bangladesh Bank tried to contact New York on February 6 by email, fax and phone to ask that the transactions be suspended when it realised that the SWIFT interbank messaging system which it normally used was not working properly, Huda said.
"We realised that the SWIFT system being ineffective was an important issue, and therefore we sent an email to Federal Reserve Bank of New York at 1:30pm on February 6 to halt all types of payment processing," he said.
But they were unable to get through as the US bank was closed for the weekend.
It was not until Monday afternoon that the central bank's main server was again working properly and officials were able to send the formal requests to stop the payments to six banks across the globe. But by that time USD 81 million had been transferred from Bangladesh Bank's New York account to a bank in the Philippines.
