Hacker News Reader

Comment by ztoben | Hacker News Reader

Okay, someone help me follow this. I understand the whole give me money and I'll double it thing. But how did he end up with $242 million? That seems like and incredible amount for a single person to have the authority to give away.

View on HN

Did some googling and based on this legal judgment it seems like his relationship with the woman at Citibank really helped in making withdrawals from the Dubai Islamic Bank https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2504755/dubai-islamic-...

Also found this article from '98 where a coworker asks the same thing and gets the same answer Ayyoub gave other people: "I asked how he had transferred so much money without approval or authorization," Salim later recalled. "Ayyoub said he had been under the influence of, or pressured by, the rich man to transfer the money." http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/babas-big-bucks-6359873

Also, this 2001 article suggests the transfers "were disguised in falsified bank ledgers" http://gulfnews.com/news/uae/general/jail-sentences-dropped-...

Given the current state of computers and surveillance, It would seem that we dont know anything about the simplicity required to pull off mass heists in the age prior to computers-in-their-current-form....

It would seem that it was REALLY easy to rob banks in the past.

I wonder what Dillenger's actual networth would have been...

American (and thus international) banking seems to work on the somehow backwads principle of allowing allmost any transaction without any real authorization (eg. credits cards, direct debits, checks and such, where only thing you really need to know for the transaction to happen is some semi-public number) and dealing with possible issues after the fact On the other hand the system is pretty good at finding the party responsible, or in other words whose insurance will be billed for the missing money (for example when you look at it from this PoV the EMV protocols and cryptography used make sense). But for that to work someone has to be actually looking for the issues.

Somewhat tangential but relevant: As I'm currently moving I spent some part of the afternoon by changing periodic payments setup on my bank account and was somehow amused by the "create transaction" menu in my (european) banks' web application. There is menu item which essentially says "Direct debit (this is probably not what you want)".

This problem has long been a "what-if-cuz-that-would-be-nice" service:

Think of a last-pass for all your varied accounts, where the service allows you to update your core information and then select which of your accounts who have subscribed to your profile info should just be updated by the service.

So if you move - with one click, update all your linked account details for zip/billing/shipping/etc...

Obviously provide a diff review opportunity and a MFA heavy confirmation process - but with an easily revertible process as well.

as well as monitoring of logins to all, and alerts for any changes to any...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com