The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Bangladesh Bank (BB) and SWIFT have reiterated their commitment to work together for recovering the remaining stolen money of $65.75 million from the Philippines.
They have also decided to continue discussions about the cyber fraud event that occurred in early February last year.
The decisions were taken at the third tripartite meeting in New York recently, according to the BB officials and a joint statement, issued by the Fed on Monday.
"The participants remain committed to working together to recover the entire proceeds of the crime, bring the perpetrators to justice in cooperation with law enforcement from other jurisdictions, and lend support to multilateral international efforts to further protect the global financial system from these types of attacks in the future," said the Fed.
As discussed at the prior meetings, the parties reviewed steps that have been and will be taken to remediate the event, and progress towards rebuilding the SWIFT-related
infrastructure in the BB to help ensure that its correspondent banking operations function in a highly secure manner, it added.
Representatives of SWIFT participated remotely, according to the statement.
The first tripartite meeting was held in Basel of Switzerland on May 10, 2016 while the second and third meetings in New York on August 16 last year and May 21, 2017 respectively.
A four-member BB team, headed by Deputy Governor Abu Hena Mohd Razee Hassan, participated the third tripartite meeting, according to the BB officials.
Later, a high-powered team comprising senior officials of the central bank and CID (Criminal Investigation Department) visited the Philippines during June 5-9 to follow the overall recovery process of the heist money.
"We're hopeful about retrieving $1.2 million more from the Philippines soon," a BB senior official, who is familiar with the recovery process, told the FE Tuesday.
He said the Philippines government reiterated its commitment to cooperate for bringing back the remaining stolen money.
Earlier on November 12 last year, Bangladesh retrieved US$15.25 million more of its central bank's stolen money from the Southeast Asian country.
With the return of the money from Manila, the total recovered amount stood at $35.25 million as the central bank of Bangladesh was able to bring back $20 million from Sri Lanka shortly after the trans-national cyber-heist.
Unknown hackers tried to steal nearly $1.0 billion from the BB account at the Fed early February last year, and succeeded in digitally burgling out $81 million into four accounts at RCBC (Rizal Commercial Banking Corp) in Manila in what is dubbed biggest such cyber heist.
The cyber fraud took place on the night of February 04, sending a total of 35 transfer orders into the Fed where the central bank of Bangladesh maintains its foreign-exchange account.
Of the 35 transfer orders placed, 30 were blocked. Four transfers to the Philippine bank for a total of $81 million went through. The rest $20 million transferred to a Sri Lankan non-government organisation was reversed because the hackers misspelled the name of the entity.
Nearly $20 million of the total amount of $101 million siphoned off was recovered from Sri Lanka. The lion's share of the money landed in the Philippines.
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