05.11.13
Smartphone photo epic fail
On the 45 million buck ATM heist:
“It took a well-coordinated and very busy industrious criminal gang — a directed mob,” said George Smith, senior fellow with Washington, D.C.-based think tank GlobalSecurity.org.
“If you have such a similar mob you can put together, you can think about trying to duplicate this type of thing,” Smith said. “But you’ll have to have some startup capital, since it’s not quite something you can just walk out the door and assemble off the cuff.”
“The picture of two of the New York errand boys flaunting their stack of bundled cash in the car won’t strike anyone as being from the high end of innovation and thinking,” Smith pointed out.
Hiring local petty criminals to do the dirty work also increases the risk of exposure, said Sean Sullivan, a security adviser with the F-Secure security firm in Helsinki, Finland.
“The need to have lots of money mules to withdraw all the cash seems to be the big complication in getting away with the crime. That leaves a trail for law enforcement” …
Or, as a commenter on Slashdot wryly observed, “This is not how bank fraud should be done. The right and proper way is to become too big to fail, too big to jail, rig the LIBOR rates, create systematic rigging, award oneself huge salaries and bonuses, threaten worldwide economic collapse, hold governments to ransom and get huge bailout money.”
Global banking, apparently particularly in the Middle East, can’t secure itself. And it is probably quite prone to criminal recruitment of insiders.
The larger issue looming is how does one secure a financial system the average person, or worker, has no faith in?
In the US, bankers and giant banks are now among the most hated. How do you save or batten down a system when attacks on the system are met with public indifference?