Two hours and 1,600 fake credit cards $13 million is gone

[Homer J Simpson]

http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/23/news/bank-fraud-south-africa-japan/index.html

[Kjelt]

Small time, couple of weeks back some hackers could scam the swift inter banking system , they were busy transferring a billion $ in total in around twentyfive transfers but they made a typo which triggered a safety mechanism. They ended up with a merely 80M$.
Banks should keep up with technology, they have almost inpenetrable safes costing millions of $ but their routers and APs are cheapo consumer rated garbage.

[alsetalokin4017]

Something's not adding up.
The article says 13 million dollars, and that corresponds well with the claimed 913 dollars max per transaction and 14,000 transactions (12782000 dollars). So where does the 20 million dollar total loss come from?
And two hours to perform 14,000 transactions at 1,400 ATMs? Ten transactions per ATM, OK fine. How many people were involved in this attack, though? Say one person could cover 10 ATMs in two hours. That's a gang of 140 people and some very well coordinated activity. One minute per transaction, one hundred minutes total for transactions, twenty minutes total travel time between the 10 ATMs per person, times 140 persons ..... It would make a great timelapse movie.

[station240]

Something's not adding up.
The article says 13 million dollars, and that corresponds well with the claimed 913 dollars max per transaction and 14,000 transactions (12782000 dollars). So where does the 20 million dollar total loss come from?

Loss = cost of overseas transaction service + having to send security out to refill ATMs + inconvenience to customers (empty ATMs) + cost of investigation.

edit: other sources say 3 hours, not 2 hours.

[botcrusher]

They might have factored in actually hiring a security contractor that they should have had in the first place.

[ZeTeX]

Wish I'd be one of them
easy money

[Syntax_Error]

Wish I'd be one of them
easy money

  You wouldn't say that if it was your money stolen. These aren't victimless crimes, even with bank insurance there is a cost, both in money and in frustration. Even with 100% reimbursement to the bank, this just results in devaluation of currency through inflation of money supply, and everybody pays the price. Thieves should have old-world style punishments.

[Tomorokoshi]

1. There are cameras all over the place. Some of those involved will be photographed.

2. Are the serial numbers recorded?

3. Expect more backoffice profiling of transactions.

[continuo]

1. There are cameras all over the place. Some of those involved will be photographed.

And there were obviously a lot of people involved. It's impossible to keep them all silent, someone will brag about this heist. They will be caught, sooner or later 

[SeanB]

Sad thing it is the bank I use the most, so I will be paying in some way for this heist. Either in the formj of reduced interest rates, or in increased service fees or a limit on the services offered.

Apparently many of the transactions were not online, but were done because many foreign banks use a cheaper offline mode so the transactions do not run through immediately, but are delayed until a batch is run at the end of the banking day, or the following morning.

Here in SA there is a lot of bank fraud, mostly preying on the gullible and either using a card cloner to get the magstripe info or making a copy of the card front and back to do card not present transactions, or by simply doing a card swap at an ATM and convincing the mark into entering the PIN so it can be used to empty the account.

Saw it done to a police detective ( brazen buggers) and in the 2 minutes it took the card division to answer the phone ( known thieves at the ATM across the road) they had taken all the money out of his account at the ATM 300m away. Arrested and free the next day doing it again, though I saw them arrested, and also saw a newspaper article about them active in another area, and phoned the investigating officer to give her the location of them ( prison) so she could carry the cases she had on them further.