Chinese Baccarat – For someone who had to launder millions of dollars in stolen funds, with investigators from three countries fighting to trace the money, Ding Jiz was a surprisingly vulnerable person. He brought a dozen or so high-end games from China to play in the glittering VIP room at Metro Manila’s Solaire Casino. The game was in Karat. It was late February 2016 – still peak casino season in Asia thanks to the Lunar New Year holiday – and Ding had been here for days. As the red-shirted tradesmen folded their arms, punters smoked Double Happiness cigarettes and helped themselves to endless helpings of mineral water, lemon tea and Hennessy XO Cognac. The chips they played in continuous flow were only valid in this room. The most expensive were the square panels at $20,000.
Ding, his partner, Gao Shuhua, and the dragsters were probably betting on both the house’s hand and the player’s hand, trying to find a balance between winning and losing. After all, the important thing for someone trying to launder money through a casino is not success. That’s millions of dollars for chips that you can exchange for cool, invisible cash at the end of the night.
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This was not the first time that the Chinese duo Ding and Gao made such a deal. According to previously unreported Chinese court documents by Bloomberg Markets, as well as interviews with family members and former business associates, running illegal gambling operations, including recruiting people to prey on foreign gamblers, was their main business. . When the casino accounts of Ding, Gao and their players were frozen in March 2016, they had won tens of millions of dollars, according to a Philippine Senate committee investigating the theft.
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The money was part of the largest cyber heist in history. In early February, according to reports by a Philippine Senate committee, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bangladesh office, in early February, 81 million dollars were stolen from the central bank of Bangladesh by hackers who faked orders through Swift, the payment system. global interbank publishing. financed. The cyber thieves sent a message to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where Bangladesh Bank had the money in its depository, instructing it to send the money to several bank accounts, mostly in the Philippines, set up under fake names.
Just days after the robbery, Bangladesh Bank officials asked their Filipino colleagues for help. However, according to reports from the casino’s parent company, Bloomberry Resorts Corp., and the Philippine Senate Committee on Public Officials Accountability and Investigations, the players were allowed to stay for weeks. Even after the rest of the funds were frozen, no charges were brought against Ding, Gao or the players with them, so the Philippine police made no arrests, says Sergio Osmeña III, a former senator who was a member of Luah’s investigation last year. “They waited until it was too late,” he says.
What Ding and Gao did with the loot is still unknown. Here’s the thing, of course: you want to hide the criminal origin of the money and then funnel it into the streams of legitimate money that flow around the world every day: $60 million here, a few million there. It increases. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP says money laundering could be worth $2 trillion a year worldwide – an amount equal to the online shopping market.
Like the money, Ding and Gao left the Philippines without a trace. (Osmania says customs officials have no record of the two going anywhere.) Also, apparently, there is no chance of Bangladesh, the Philippines or the United States finding the money.
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But if Ding and Gao thought they got away unarmed, they were wrong. The story didn’t end in Solaire’s flower-scented VIP room. It just went – China and then maybe North Korea too, home of Lazarus, one of the world’s most active state-sponsored hacking collectives.
As big as it was, the theft could have been much bigger. According to various investigations, the hackers originally wanted to transfer $951 million of Bangladesh Bank funds to fake accounts. Using SWIFT, they sent a series of messages to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to do so. According to an April 14, 2016 letter from the Fed to U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat, the theft of the full amount was only prevented because after the initial payments were made, multiple transactions “were required to be investigated.” “conformity of punishments” were shown. . (After the Bangladesh theft, Swift took steps to prevent similar attacks. “We are fully committed to helping customers in the fight against cyber attacks,” Patrick Karkles, Swift’s legal counsel, said in an emailed response. to questions. Swift’s security program, he said, “clearly helped detect and even prevent successful frauds.”) Since then, Philippine authorities have recovered about a fifth of the stolen money and sent it to Bangladesh, but most of the rest , after going through a series of calculations. , a money transfer company and local casinos, has disappeared into the air of Manila.
Some or all of it may have found its way to North Korea. The FBI is looking into the totalitarian state’s connection to the hack, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the investigation.
All that’s needed in a heist like that of the Bangladesh Bank is a collection of hacking wizards to move the money and some old-school bleaching to clean it up and cover the trail.
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In addition, security companies, including Symantec Corp and BAE Systems Plc, say Lazarus hackers working for the rogue state were likely behind the attack. He drew a distinction between the methods used in the Bangladesh attack and those used in other cases, such as the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. In 2014, it was assigned to North Korea by US officials. Cybersecurity experts say Lazarus was also behind the WannaCry ransomware attack in May that infected hundreds of thousands of computers around the world.
In addition to being cut off from the world and affected by sanctions imposed by the United Nations, the US, South Korea and Japan, North Korea needs convertible currencies to finance imports, among other things. It uses a changing set of agents, shipping companies and brokers to bring in illicit cash, says Juan Zarate, former deputy US national security adviser and author of “Treasury War: Ushering in a New Era of Financial Warfare.”
Stealing money from a central bank would be another way. “It is a clear fact that these threat groups are constantly preparing or attempting to attack the financial sector,” South Korea’s government-funded Financial Security Institute said in July of Lazarus and related hacking rings. All that is required in a heist like that of Bangladesh Bank is a collection of hacking wizards to move the money and some old-school whitewashing to clean it up and cover the road. Ding and Gao were certainly not experts in the past, according to their accounts in court records and family members and acquaintances. Gao’s wife, Yan Wanli, says she is not computer literate. Ding is a tech novice who needs help to post a WeChat account where he used to send selfies while traveling, says a former business associate, who asked not to be named.
Walk the zig-zag streets of Chengdu, a Chinese city on the Taiwan Strait, and you’ll see plenty of footprints on business signs. They are a prominent family, part of a Muslim community that settled on this stretch of land centuries ago, when the area was the main port of entry for foreign traders. While some of the Ding clan have built business empires here – making sneakers, for example – Ding Zhiz has made a name for himself in Macau’s casinos 600 kilometers (373 miles) up the coast.
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Now 45, Ding founded an investment company in 2007 that made Macau the world’s largest gambling center by revenue. Neighbors and a former business partner say he also arranged for gamblers from mainland China to take casino trips, which would be illegal under Chinese law. In addition, these people say, Ding specialized in organizing table bets, private bets from anonymous bettors using bookmakers. According to a paper published in the British Journal of Criminology in February, these bets are often reduced by players who are physically present in casinos.
Although it is not clear how much Ding has earned from his operations, his expenses have skyrocketed. In 2008, he invested $1 million in a real estate company near his hometown and hired Asian pop stars to develop a spa there called Bali. Ding and his wife eventually closed the business. After that, they bought high-rises in Macau. it is now worth $1 million. About half an hour’s drive from there, the couple owns a four-story home surrounded by a koi pond, bonsai trees and at least seven security cameras. The lot alone is worth $5 million, local real estate agents estimate. . The Dings’ wealth can be measured by what they lost. A police report lists more than $600,000 worth of items stolen in a burglary at their home several years ago, including two HK$200,000 ($25,600) Swiss watches.