Bank heists net $45M :

 In global ATM/debit card raid

 

 

 

you didn’t lose a dime — unless you are an investor in the banks, of course.  The heists took place in December and February but just now became public, thanks to an indictment filed yesterday in New York.  The gang raided accounts used by banks to backstop rechargeable pre-paid debit cards rather than attack depositor accounts, exploiting security gaps in that system.

Even with all that, crime didn’t pay — at least not for long:

A worldwide gang of criminals stole $45 million in a matter of hours by hacking their way into a database of prepaid debit cards and then draining cash machines around the globe, federal prosecutors said Thursday — and outmoded U.S. card technology may be partly to blame.

Seven people are under arrest in the U.S. in connection with the case, which prosecutors said involved thousands of thefts from ATMs using bogus magnetic swipe cards carrying information from Middle Eastern banks. The fraudsters moved with astounding speed to loot financial institutions around the world, working in cells including one in New York, Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch said. …

There were two separate attacks, one in December that reaped $5 million worldwide and one in February that snared about $40 million in 10 hours with about 36,000 transactions. The scheme involved attacks on two banks, Rakbank in the United Arab Emirates and the Bank of Muscat in Oman, prosecutors said.

The plundered ATMs were in Japan, Russia, Romania, Egypt, Colombia, Britain, Sri Lanka, Canada and several other countries, and law enforcement agencies from more than a dozen nations were involved in the investigation, U.S. prosecutors said.

How did the feds catch up with them?  Well, they may have figured out the sophisticated technology that allowed them to breach bank security, but they’re not exactly sophisticated themselves:

One of the suspects was caught on surveillance cameras, his backpack increasingly loaded down with cash, authorities said. Others took photos of themselves with giant wads of bills as they made their way up and down Manhattan.

In other words, tech smart and street dumb.
The leader of the gang didn’t get arrested yesterday, even though his name is on the indictment.  Why not?  Alberto Ysui Lajud-Pena got murdered in the Dominican Republic last month, and he may have been the target of a less-sophisticated kind of heist:

Lajud-Pena was found dead with a suitcase full of about $100,000 in cash, and the investigation into his death is continuing separately. Dominican officials said they arrested a man in the killing who said it was a botched robbery, and two other suspects were on the lam.

It looks like Lajud-Pena exercised the same kind of discretion about his loot as the rest of the network.  Want to bet that these two suspects aren’t taking pictures of themselves with wads of cash while walking on the streets?


by Ed Morrissey




Q-poll shows Menendez cratering on approval in NJ

Those darned right-wing blogs!  In case no one knew it before, today’s poll from Quinnipiac demonstrates that allegations of corruption and use of prostitution still matters in politics, even in New Jersey. In a month, Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) has gone from a 51-33 approval rating to 36/41, a 23-point drop in the gap:

Obama administration tries to block sequester layoff notices

The latest durable-goods orders report must have the Obama administration — and the Obama campaign — more worried than they publicly let on.  According to the National Journal, the White House will press government contractors to hold off on issuing layoff notices in October in anticipation of the sequestration cuts, afraid of the political backlash that will ensue.  In fact, the Obama administration is offering to indemnify government contractors for losses and fines for delaying those notices:

The White House moved to prevent defense and other government contractors from issuing mass layoff notices in anticipation of sequestration, even going so far to say that the contracting agencies would cover any potential litigation costs or employee compensation costs that could follow.
Some defense companies—including Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems and EADS North America—have said they expect to send notices to their employees 60 days before sequestration takes effect to comply with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, which requires companies to give advance warning to workers deemed reasonably likely to lose their jobs. Companies appeared undeterred by a July 30 guidance from the Labor Department, which said issuing such notices would be inappropriate, due to the possibility that sequestration may be averted. The Labor Department also said companies do not have enough information about how the cuts might be implemented to determine which workers or specific programs could be affected should Congress fail to reach a compromise to reduce the deficit, triggering $1.2 trillion in spending cuts, half from defense, half non-defense. For 2013, that would amount to $109 billion in spending cuts.

Yesterday, the OMB went a little farther in wheedling contractors into playing ball:

So the Office of Management and Budget went a step further in guidance issued late Friday afternoon. If an agency terminates or modifies a contract, and the contractor must close a plant or lay off workers en masse, the company could treat employee compensation costs for WARN Act liability, attorneys’ fees and other litigation costs as allowable costs to be covered by the contracting agency—so long as the contractor has followed a course of action consistent with the Labor Department’s guidance. The legal fees would be covered regardless of the outcome of the litigation, according to the OMB guidance issued by Daniel Werfel, controller of the Office of Federal Financial Management, and Joseph Jordan, the Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy.

In other words, taxpayers will cover the costs of these layoffs through more spending, even though the point of sequestration was to force cuts in government spending.  Instead of paying contractors — mainly defense workers — to work, we’ll start paying them not to work.  And why?  Because the White House doesn’t want massive numbers of layoff notices coming in the last few days ahead of the election.  And make no mistake — with overall durable goods orders dropping 13.2% in a month and defense orders dropping 40%, those layoff notices would otherwise be coming, and sooner rather than later.
In other words, the White House wants taxpayers to pay to cover up the inevitable outcome of sequestration to keep Barack Obama from suffering the political consequences of his own deal.  Unless those funds are coming from Team Obama, this looks pretty corrupt — which is undoubtedly why Obama chose to have this OMB edict issued late on Friday afternoon, when few would be paying attention.

by Ed Morrissey