Interpol specialist team joins CID in Bangladesh Bank funds heist probe

A team of experts from the Interpol has joined Bangladesh Police’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in the investigation into the Bangladesh Bank cyber heist.

The six-strong team arrived in Dhaka on Tuesday and started working on the case from Wednesday morning, CID’s Additional DIG Shah Alam told bdnews24.com.

“This IT forensic specialists’ team led by Brad Marden will work with the CID until May 6,” he said.

Hackers, using the SWIFT messaging platform, tried to make fraudulent transfers totalling $951 million from the central bank's account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in February.

Most of the payments were blocked, but $81 million was routed to bank accounts in the Philippines and then diverted to casinos there. Most of those funds remain missing.

After Bangladesh Bank started a case over the heist with Motijheel police on Mar 15, the CID were tasked with the investigation.

They had collected some data and information from the central bank’s computers and server.

Shah Alam said, “While working on these data, we started thinking about asking the Interpol for assistance. We did, and they have come.”

They will, however, work in the laboratory with the CID specialists for now, he added.

“The Interpol team will mainly work as computer forensic analysts. We will take technical assistance from them.”

Alam said the team members are from different countries including from the International Criminal Police Organisation, or Interpol’s Singapore regional office.

In response to another question, he said their investigation was on the right track. “We’re getting information from different directions.

“Police officials who have visited the Philippines and Sri Lanka gathered a lot of data related to the probe and they have been proven useful.”

The CID were also surprised to find out that the central bank had hidden the fact that they had recently appointed IT advisors from the Philippines.

An official of the agency said they knew from the start of the inquiry that two different teams from that country had worked as IT advisors to Bangladesh Bank in 2009 and 2011.

“But only 2-3 days ago we found out that Filipino IT advisors worked in 2015 and 2016 too. Bangladesh Bank didn’t tell us that.”

Additional DIG Shah Alam said the central bank even was in contact with the advisors from the Philippines in January.

“Their hiding this fact from us has been taken very seriously. We’ll definitely talk to Bangladesh Bank officials about this,” he added.