I would be all for banning submissions from zerohedge.com outright. It's just noise that makes it harder for me to skim headlines for actual content.
I kinda like the articles on Zero Hedge. Is there a reason people on HN don't seem to like it?
How Hackers Stole $100M from the New York Fed
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Re: How Hackers Stole $100M from the New York Fed
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
That part of the story makes the least sense. So casino gets $100M. Then what? If the casino isn't involved in the scheme, how can a thief take that $100M, using chips or not?
Convert money to chips, cycle chips around, convert chips to cash. It's a really common money laundering technique, though not usually at this scale.
So casino buys chips from itself, gambles with itself, then exchanges the chips to cash where exactly? That makes no sense.
Re: How Hackers Stole $100M from the New York Fed
#43From the Filipino source here:
http://business.inquirer.net/207742/100-m-laundering-via-ph-...
> a total of $100 million that was brought into the country’s banking system, sold to a black market foreign exchange broker, transferred to at least three large local casinos, sold back to the money broker and moved out to overseas accounts.
Here's how I think that this heist went and I am just speculating here based solely on the info in the report:
- They first wired the money to multiple accounts of a secondary financial institution (Remittance or FX business) which is characterized by heavy and frequent transactions so as not to raise suspicions.
- They collected the money with the help of the facilitator in that organization.
- They exchanged the dollars into pesos and likely in counterfeit bills at very lucrative rates just to account for the risks hoping for more rewards from the operation.
- They took the money and deposited them in the casinos for ships settling debts and laundering the money in the process.
- They traded the chips for authentic cash from the casinos and then went back to their FX broker to exchange it back in USD.
- Finally, they reached out to their man at the FX/remittance business to have the funds wired overseas to the final recipients and probably masked with other legitimate transactions for better security for them.
Re: How Hackers Stole $100M from the New York Fed
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever been to a casino? You buy chips with cash, then you play with the chips, then you cash the (remaining) chips in for cash. There is no tracking of where each chip came from. EDIT: Although maybe you're right, if the "gamblers" deposited funds to the casino via wire, direct from the fed, and then exchanged them for chips. So the casinos should presumably have some record of who came to claim that wire in…
I'm surprised they haven't started putting RFID tags in every chip so they can track exactly how much each player spends at each game. Combined with proper record keeping, if chips were ever stolen, you could flag them and make sure they can't be redeemed for cash. Maybe in Vegas?
Casino chips have had RFID tags for years.[1][2] The tracking is getting quite good. Casinos can know how much players bet, lost, and won.[3] The casino chip RFID vendors have solved the tag collision problem quite well; casinos can inventory big stacks of chips all at once, obtaining the serial number of each chip.
Chips can be flagged or invalidated by serial number.
[1] http://singularityhub.com/2011/02/12/1-5m-robbery-of-bellagi... [2] http://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/16/cheaters-may-speed-need-for-p... [3] http://www.gpigaming.com/rfid-technology/rfid-in-casino-chip...
Re: How Hackers Stole $100M from the New York Fed
#45Choice quote:
"In other words, the Fed was funding gamblers, only these were located in Philippine casinos, not in the financial district. Ironically, that's precisely what the Fed does, only it normally operates with gamblers operating out of Manhattan's financial district."
Re: How Hackers Stole $100M from the New York Fed
#46I would be all for banning submissions from zerohedge.com outright. It's just noise that makes it harder for me to skim headlines for actual content.
This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I feel the same way about Vice. Its not news, its entertainment. And when you can't disambiguate the two, its fucking dangerous.
Yes VICE makes 100% of everything up. This is why even big news media outlets own a stake in it. Bush did 911 too.
Re: How Hackers Stole $100M from the New York Fed
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Convert money to chips, cycle chips around, convert chips to cash. It's a really common money laundering technique, though not usually at this scale.
So casino buys chips from itself, gambles with itself, then exchanges the chips to cash where exactly? That makes no sense.
The implication in the article is that the casinos weren't directly involved in the money laundering. Those who were perpetrating it brought the money into the casinos (ie bought chips with "dirty" money), engaged in otherwise legitimate looking behavior at the casinos, and then cashed out the chips for cash. Apparently, the loop on this was tight enough not to fool investigators.
Re: How Hackers Stole $100M from the New York Fed
#48I would be all for banning submissions from zerohedge.com outright. It's just noise that makes it harder for me to skim headlines for actual content.
I kinda like the articles on Zero Hedge. Is there a reason people on HN don't seem to like it?
They're usually extremely misleading if not completely false. The headlines are all cherry-picked doom and gloom that appeals to the Infowars crowd.. There was a period during the GFC where their reporting was a bit more reflective of reality but it's completely jumped the shark since then. From someone who works in finance, ZH is complete garbage.
Re: How Hackers Stole $100M from the New York Fed
#49I would be all for banning submissions from zerohedge.com outright. It's just noise that makes it harder for me to skim headlines for actual content.
Thirded.
ZeroHedge is full of conspiracy theories about the banks, Fed, EU, and the Western World in general. On the other hand, whatever Russia or China does, especially militarily, is great and shows good leadership.
Even this article starts by accusing the Fed multiple times of not noticing the fraudulent wire transfers, when in fact towards the end they say that the feds stopped 90% of the fraudulent transfers and notified the Bangladesh central bank of irregularities!
Re: How Hackers Stole $100M from the New York Fed
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I kinda like the articles on Zero Hedge. Is there a reason people on HN don't seem to like it?
They're usually extremely misleading if not completely false. The headlines are all cherry-picked doom and gloom that appeals to the Infowars crowd.. There was a period during the GFC where their reporting was a bit more reflective of reality but it's completely jumped the shark since then. From someone who works in finance, ZH is complete garbage.
ZH was good in 2009. Then it slowly went downhill. It became an anti HFT/anti Fed site, then a gold-bug site, and now a pro Russia/China outlet.
Typical ZH logic: when gold goes up, it's the smart investors noticing the corruption of the "markets" and acting accordingly. When gold goes down, it's the HFTs and the Feds slamming it down because if it goes up it destroys the faith in the US Dollar. If it spikes up, it smart money doing a play. If it spikes down, it's blatant manipulation by someone without a "fiduciary duty" (ie: they imply that the seller doesn't care that he loses money because it sells quickly instead of working the order more slowly)