
A $500M Central Bank Heist and How It Was Foiled - prostoalex
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-500-million-central-bank-heistand-how-it-was-foiled-1538578897
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neonate
[http://archive.is/wpmBz](http://archive.is/wpmBz)

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paulcole
If the paywall is so offensive, why not ban WSJ links instead of allowing and
promoting copyright infringement on this site?

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wolrah
I'm 100% behind banning WSJ and all other paywalled links, or at least having
a highly visible (and preferablly filterable) flag, but it's a real stretch to
call an archive.is link "copyright infringement" and make a moral judgement on
it.

It's not like someone saved and reposted a sign-in only page, this is in the
same vein as the Wayback Machine and Google Cache. The content was publicly
available to the point that a well known bot was able to reach it.

edit: I looked at the history of the link and it has an older copy where more
of the images work.

[http://archive.is/4S2IG](http://archive.is/4S2IG)

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neom
Highly recommend the HSBC episode of Netflix's Dirty Money (especially if you
also bank there, explained a lot of why they've been a really weird bank).

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jiveturkey
the story tries its best to make it sound like some defect in the bank's
handling of the transfers. although there were minor issues, they were
correctly caught via "defense in depth" techniques, ie many many layers of
process.

the story focuses far too much on the bank's handling of the transfers and not
enough on the obviousness of a standard con and gullibility of senior
government finance ministers.

where these guys really really went wrong was not having enough of a starter
fund so as to plant moles (who would later be abandoned to the police with no
useful info) within the bank that would have allowed the transfers to go
through. amateur hour, really.

