RCBC (Photo : Worldfinance.com)
Kim Wong, a Chinese junket operator in the Philippines, promised to the Bangladeshi Central Bank that he would partially return the $81 million stolen by hackers from the poor Asian country.
But of the total amount stolen, using an elaborate money laundering scheme, Wong said only $4.63 million is intact, reported Shanghai Daily. The bulk, which ended up in the hands of casino and junket operators in Manila, had vanished.
Of the $81 billion, $21 million (1 billion pesos) was deposited without his knowledge to Eastern Hawaii, a company that Wong owns. The branch manager of RCBC bank was the one who opened four bank accounts on Feb. 4 where the stolen funds were deposited by forging the signatures of bank clients. Within days, the money was withdrawn of which $56 million ended up in casinos.
Solaire, a casino resort run by Bloomberry Resorts Corp., got $29 million, credited to an account of a high-roller based in Macau. Solaire, through lawyer Silverio Benny Tan, said it froze the remaining $2.3 million when it learned about the heist in March, reported The Wall Street Journal.
Wong got another $5 million through foreign exchange broker Philrem. He said $4.63 million of that amount is still intact and he is willing to give it back to Bangladesh.
The money was arranged in the grand cyberheist by two Chinese men, Ding Zhi Ze from Macau and Gao Shu Hua from Beijing. One of the two owed him 450 million pesos which was used to settle a casino debt. The remaining money, Wong used to purchase gambling chips for junket clients.
It was not only the Bangladeshi Central Bank that the hackers victimized. They also attempted to steal $951 million from an account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, but most of their transfer attempts were blocked.
The Philippine Senate, which held on Tuesday a hearing on the cybercrime, had difficulty tracing where the rest of the stolen $81 million went because of the strict banking secrecy law of the Philippines and non-inclusion of casinos in anti-money laundering regulations.
Last week, the Philippine Anti-Money Laundering Council filed criminal complaint against Wong and Xu Weikang, another Chinese national who arranges for high-stakes gamblers to travel to casinos in the Philippines, for breaching the country’s anti-money laundering laws.
